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05-16-2001, 04:33 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Posts: 1,314
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(Here's a master who never disappoints. One of many fine poems.)
Night Journey
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
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05-16-2001, 08:31 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Federal Way, Washington, USA
Posts: 1,664
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Mac:
Roethke manages to disappoint me fairly often. It could be that I have some perverse resistance to him because he was such an icon at the University of Washington, where I was an undergraduate and a graduate student. His mark on the English department seemed indelible. However, this poem certainly does not disappoint me. It's beautiful and seems not to miss a turn (well, maybe that "lake beneath my knees" sounds a little funny, as if he's wet his pants). It's a pretty accurate account of the train trip through the Cascades to Seattle, too, although I don't know whether that was the occasion of its writing.
Thanks for posting it.
Richard
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05-16-2001, 08:45 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Athens, Greece
Posts: 3,205
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I love much of Roethke--at least 3 or 4 of his poems are included in my Personal Mental Anthology of All-Time Favorite Poems. This is one I tend to forget about, for some reason, but am always delighted to re-encounter. Thank you for posting.
Alicia
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05-17-2001, 06:01 AM
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Lariat Emeritus
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
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I think it was in a Song for Sir John Davies that Roethke wrote "I take this cadence from a man named Yeats," and that is my only problem with him. At his best he is sooo Yeatsian, right down to the windiness and posturing, that I find him pretty derivative. But he sure can write trimeter.
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05-17-2001, 05:01 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Posts: 1,314
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Tim, I thought you'd like the Trimeter. Funny, Roethke's usually considered derivative on Eliot (a good source for wordiness and posturing!).
A good topic, maybe. Imitation is a curious thing. There are many successful imitations of Spenser and Milton...but not so many direct imitations of Shakespeare-- at least none that are any good. Poets who try to imitate either Frost or Eliot (whatever their respective merits) don't seem to profit much by it. I don't usually think of any poets being heavily influenced by Yeats...why not?
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05-18-2001, 06:27 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
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Mac, I can't think of any 20th C. poet who exerted greater influence--often destructive--than Yeats. In Ireland, read Austin Clark, W.R. Rodgers, early Kinsella, Padraic Fallon, MacNeice, etc. Here, read early Lowell, Roethke and Delmore Schwartz, to name just a few. Dylan Thomas regarded himself as unfortunately derivative of Y. I may be projecting my own struggles. Having memorized 10,000 lines of him in my teens, I still have to purge my verse of Yeatsian echoes, like this from a youthful elegy I'll never publish:
She thought the Treasury a golden font
pouring forth bounty to the poor and old,
not a vile trough where votes are bought and sold.
During his postgrad fellowship at Harvard, Dick Wilbur taught a year on Yeats and said it was almost the end of him as a poet.
This morning I reread the Four for John Davies and A Dying Man (which is in the assumed voice of Yeats) and both solidified my opinion that Roethke was truly marred by Y's heavy-handed influence.
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05-18-2001, 07:13 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: New York, NY, USA
Posts: 2,196
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Really? I find him so much freer than Yeats, and sexier, and more contemporary-sounding and "with it," and much more psychologically astute. Sometimes his stuff is too precious for my taste, though (red-blooded American guys shouldn't use the word "sigh"), and sometimes he's too ponderous. I suppose the ponderous stuff is the Yeatsian stuff.
I alway liked this one:
DOLOR
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
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05-19-2001, 01:17 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: New York City
Posts: 797
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Tim, what are the qualities of Yeats's style that are so contagious and destructive, and why? Can you give me some examples?
Kate, I've never liked that poem by Roethke simply because I think it is untrue. I've never found anything depressing about the business office environment.
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