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The Far Field
With Roethke's sudden, tragic death in 1963, a great poetic career was brought to an untimely end. "The Far Field" presents the most rewarding of his many volumes of poetry, both in brilliance of style and inner meaning. All of the poems have appeared previously in periodicals such as "The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Ladies' Home Journal, The New Yorker", and "The Partisan Review". Lightning Print on Demand Title.
108 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1998
About the author
Theodore Roethke
61 books220 followersAmerican poet Theodore Roethke published short lyrical works in
The Waking
(1953) and other collections.
Rhythm and natural imagery characterized volumes of Theodore Huebner Roethke. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking. Roethke wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." From childhood experiences of working in floral company of his family in Saginaw, Roethke drew inspiration. Beginning is 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively; he received two National Book Awards among an array of honors. In 1959, Yale University awarded him the prestigious Bollingen Prize. Roethke taught at Michigan State College, (present-day Michigan State University) and at colleges in Pennsylvania and Vermont before joining the faculty of the University of Washington at Seattle in 1947.
Rhythm and natural imagery characterized volumes of Theodore Huebner Roethke. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking. Roethke wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." From childhood experiences of working in floral company of his family in Saginaw, Roethke drew inspiration. Beginning is 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively; he received two National Book Awards among an array of honors. In 1959, Yale University awarded him the prestigious Bollingen Prize. Roethke taught at Michigan State College, (present-day Michigan State University) and at colleges in Pennsylvania and Vermont before joining the faculty of the University of Washington at Seattle in 1947.
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April 9, 2024This was very enjoyable. Very focused on nature and our relationship to/with it. Some of it could be repetitive but overall a stunning poetry book.
“The Far Field” was my favorite poem.
“The Far Field” was my favorite poem.
December 25, 2019
I discovered Theodore Rothke's poetry in college, and, although I was enchanted by it, I didn't really have the time to sit around, musing about poetry. However, at a recent library book sale, I found a slim paperback of The Far Field and delightedly threw it into my $1 bag of books. I took it home, set it on my messy overflow bookshelf, and kept promising myself that I'd read it (along with the 30+ other books on that shelf.) There it sat, untouched until I decided that this year I was going to observe the "Icelandic tradition" circulating on the internet where people read books and eat chocolate on Christmas Eve night. I told my sister about it and which book I intended to read (THIS ONE!), and she even wrapped it up for me so I could "open" it and then enjoy it with the dark chocolate I purchased for myself.
10/10 highly recommend staying up on Christmas Eve & reading while eating chocolate. It's as amazing as it sounds. And it definitely helped that I had such wonderful writing for my company. I fell in love with Rothke's nature descriptions when I first discovered his poetry, and those are still some of my favorite parts. But in my (not at all professional) opinion, he's a fairly flawless poet. JUST LOOK at these beautiful lines:
"Being, not doing, is my first joy."
Or these:
"My wrath, where's the edge
Of the fine shapely thought
That I carried so long
When so young, when so young?"
OR THIS ONE:
"What does what it should do needs nothing more."
Two small content advisories if you're thinking about reading this book: Please remember that this is poetry. It's sensuous. There's one poem that is super obviously referring to sex, although he doesn't describe it in any detail. AND there are several poems where he's talking about being reincarnated, so if that weirds you out this might not be for you. Neither of these things diminished my enjoyment of this book in the least, and I'm hanging on to my paperback so I can read my favorites again and again.
10/10 highly recommend staying up on Christmas Eve & reading while eating chocolate. It's as amazing as it sounds. And it definitely helped that I had such wonderful writing for my company. I fell in love with Rothke's nature descriptions when I first discovered his poetry, and those are still some of my favorite parts. But in my (not at all professional) opinion, he's a fairly flawless poet. JUST LOOK at these beautiful lines:
"Being, not doing, is my first joy."
Or these:
"My wrath, where's the edge
Of the fine shapely thought
That I carried so long
When so young, when so young?"
OR THIS ONE:
"What does what it should do needs nothing more."
Two small content advisories if you're thinking about reading this book: Please remember that this is poetry. It's sensuous. There's one poem that is super obviously referring to sex, although he doesn't describe it in any detail. AND there are several poems where he's talking about being reincarnated, so if that weirds you out this might not be for you. Neither of these things diminished my enjoyment of this book in the least, and I'm hanging on to my paperback so I can read my favorites again and again.
Read
June 29, 2012Roethke’s The Far Field takes on the familiar poetic trope of the individual’s search for truth, authenticity, meaning beyond the boundaries of the small individual self towards what the speaker of the book’s first sequence of poems identifies as “the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.” This is the stillness and fullness achieved through oneness, however provisional, with all that exists in the wider world, and Roethke stages in the sections of the book three ways that that journey can be undertaken, capturing with clarity the contradictions at the heart of this search. The struggle from the self is both a struggle to go deeper inside and also a struggle to escape.
In the first sequence of poems, that search must be earned through disengagement--from ourselves ultimately, but first from society. So the book’s first section portrays the search for truth as something that occurs through meditation on nature. Other than a key moment or two, other humans only show up only at the beginning of the first of these poems, and there society is clearly the condition that must be escaped: “On things asleep, no balm: / A kingdom of stinks and sighs,” where, with “Saliva dripping from warm microphones, / Agony of crucifixion on barstools,” we find “Happiness left to dogs and children-- / (Matters only a saint mentions!).” The world of people thoroughly betrays the full meaning of our existence. “Lust fatigues the soul” into a state of “sensual emptiness” in which “the spirit fails to move forward, / But shrinks into a half-life, less than itself.” Roethke wants us to escape this false world and pursue the fuller truth of our existence, and so we must journey away from society. The opening stanza of the “The Far Field” imagines it this way:
I dream of journeys repeatedly,
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel,
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleep, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
The first set of poems in the book is grouped as a “North American Sequence,” so it should come as no surprise that an escape from the hell of other people must occur in a car, and anyway the larger point is implicit: even in the effort towards spirituality there inheres its opposite, the material, the technological; so the escape into nature is somehow false, preceding from inauthentic premises. Here is the first of the implicit arguments Roethke makes about the search for authenticity: we must recognize the impossibility of purity. That must be part of the truth we accommodate.
But this impossibility is also a form of hope, in terms of our ability to transcend ourselves. As things are contaminated with their opposites, we are contaminated by things--we are connected to them, interpenetrated by them, and this capacity to be unified with the world is our salvation. “I am most immoderately married: / The Lord God has taken my heaviness away; / I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air.” Here we see the speaker merged in one image with both bird and air. And when this sort of unity is achieved, it is achieved for Roethke briefly but deeply: “Delighting in surface change, the glitter of light on waves, / And I roam elsewhere, my body thinking, / Turning toward the other side of light, / […] / Neither forward not backward, / Unperplexed, in a place leading nowhere.” This oneness opens a space in which we can perceive ourselves correctly, beyond the narcissistic echoes that make of all the world only a mirror to confirm the existence of our desires (our “forward” and “backward”). It makes us more than ourselves. Roethke’s images lock down how hard-earned and fleeting this sensation of unity is, repeatedly using the verb “sway” to describe the state, as in “The Rose” where the speaker says “I sway outside myself,” or, later, in that poem’s culminating position:
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
The truth is we must be beyond ourselves in order to cease being only ourselves and that the best we can hope for is a swaying, a temporary movement out of ourselves, into this truth. And the verb “sway” here draws attention to itself--an organic movement, a blurring, an imprecision, almost accidental or without clear control; so is our encounter with that which is not us. “I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly, / Become another thing.” The self is capable of embracing the world; but it must do so at the cost of losing control, losing even itself. From a loneliness this pure we become so unanchored that we can drift into the realm of Being itself. “My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves; / I lose and find myself in the long water; / I am gathered together once more; / I embrace the world.”
This argument is challenged immediately by the book’s second section of poems, which are labeled “Love Poems.” This is an odd but telling fit for the book, a bald contradiction, as if to say that maybe the way to truth is not isolation, dissolution, unity with the natural world. Perhaps transcendence comes through the opposite: through romantic love, love of the singular Other. But this is a proposition not well-trusted by the book. The speaker imagines himself from the beloved’s perspective as an apparition, while figuring her as material, natural, actual being, calling her at one point “My lizard, my lovely writher,” and adding elsewhere the playful note about her sexuality, “Who’d look when he could feel? / She’d more sides than a seal.” But despite this, it is clear still, even in the poems that testify to the couple’s love, that the speaker’s loneliness abides. The truth of it sings through the clearest image in the love poem, which comes in the opening stanza of “The Happy Three”:
Inside, my darling wife
Sharpened a butcher knife
Sighed out her pure relief
That I was gone.
That knife resides in a very curious place indeed, Mr. Roethke, and while the comma declares that she is in the house and the knife is in her hand, the line break shades the ambiguous suggestion of a darker location, echoed in the rhyme that would identify wife and knife. And so we are back in the world where people are divided from themselves and from each other as if by blades.
Moreover, the solipsistic nightmare which is never stated in the escape to nature of the “North American Sequence” becomes clear here. See, for instance, “His Foreboding”: “I sing the wind around / And hear myself return / To nothingness, alone. The loneliest thing I know / Is my own mind at play.” Here the speaker knows that everywhere he looks he finds only the sterile reproduction of himself. His notion of meditation out of himself towards unity with all Being was a delusion.
And so we step into “The Abyss,” treated in the fantastic opening poem of the book’s third section. In it, the speaker looks right at this fear of the inauthentic life that is inauthentic precisely through its spiritual pretenses: “I have taken, too often, the dangerous path, / The vague, the arid, / Neither in nor out of this life.” The essential question for those who would seek the truth in this way is: “Do we move toward God, or merely another condition?” The only way to know is to confront the abyss, which is always right there with us: “The abyss you can’t miss: / It’s right where you are-- / A step down the stair.” Though the abyss is terrifying, it also holds a promise: “if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant, / The burning lake turns into a forest pool, / The fire subsides into rings of water, / A sunlit silence.”
So in Roethke’s telling, it is not only through an encounter with nature, or with another human being, that we find what redeems our humanity; we must also confront the abyss that separates us from the world. Only if we can stand to witness the abyss, having lost even ourselves in the effort, can we connect with the visible world rendered so precisely in the first section of the book as well as the hidden world beyond it. After all, “The Decision” asks, “What shakes the eye but the invisible?” There, on the other side of light, we find that “Being, not doing, is [our] first joy.”
In “The Right Thing,” the penultimate poem in the book, we come to yet another revised stance regarding self and searching. Here the speaker of the poems throws up his hands, declares it all pointless: “Let others probe the mystery if they can / Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will— / The right thing happens to the happy man,” because he, “praising change as the slow night comes on, / Wills what he would, surrendering his will / Till mystery is no more: No more he can. / The right thing happens to the happy man.” The final poem, “Once More, the Round,” promises that “everything comes to One, / As we dance on, dance on, dance on.” So, in the end, it doesn’t much matter how you try unify with the world; unify you will, eventually.
In the first sequence of poems, that search must be earned through disengagement--from ourselves ultimately, but first from society. So the book’s first section portrays the search for truth as something that occurs through meditation on nature. Other than a key moment or two, other humans only show up only at the beginning of the first of these poems, and there society is clearly the condition that must be escaped: “On things asleep, no balm: / A kingdom of stinks and sighs,” where, with “Saliva dripping from warm microphones, / Agony of crucifixion on barstools,” we find “Happiness left to dogs and children-- / (Matters only a saint mentions!).” The world of people thoroughly betrays the full meaning of our existence. “Lust fatigues the soul” into a state of “sensual emptiness” in which “the spirit fails to move forward, / But shrinks into a half-life, less than itself.” Roethke wants us to escape this false world and pursue the fuller truth of our existence, and so we must journey away from society. The opening stanza of the “The Far Field” imagines it this way:
I dream of journeys repeatedly,
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel,
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleep, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
The first set of poems in the book is grouped as a “North American Sequence,” so it should come as no surprise that an escape from the hell of other people must occur in a car, and anyway the larger point is implicit: even in the effort towards spirituality there inheres its opposite, the material, the technological; so the escape into nature is somehow false, preceding from inauthentic premises. Here is the first of the implicit arguments Roethke makes about the search for authenticity: we must recognize the impossibility of purity. That must be part of the truth we accommodate.
But this impossibility is also a form of hope, in terms of our ability to transcend ourselves. As things are contaminated with their opposites, we are contaminated by things--we are connected to them, interpenetrated by them, and this capacity to be unified with the world is our salvation. “I am most immoderately married: / The Lord God has taken my heaviness away; / I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air.” Here we see the speaker merged in one image with both bird and air. And when this sort of unity is achieved, it is achieved for Roethke briefly but deeply: “Delighting in surface change, the glitter of light on waves, / And I roam elsewhere, my body thinking, / Turning toward the other side of light, / […] / Neither forward not backward, / Unperplexed, in a place leading nowhere.” This oneness opens a space in which we can perceive ourselves correctly, beyond the narcissistic echoes that make of all the world only a mirror to confirm the existence of our desires (our “forward” and “backward”). It makes us more than ourselves. Roethke’s images lock down how hard-earned and fleeting this sensation of unity is, repeatedly using the verb “sway” to describe the state, as in “The Rose” where the speaker says “I sway outside myself,” or, later, in that poem’s culminating position:
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
The truth is we must be beyond ourselves in order to cease being only ourselves and that the best we can hope for is a swaying, a temporary movement out of ourselves, into this truth. And the verb “sway” here draws attention to itself--an organic movement, a blurring, an imprecision, almost accidental or without clear control; so is our encounter with that which is not us. “I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly, / Become another thing.” The self is capable of embracing the world; but it must do so at the cost of losing control, losing even itself. From a loneliness this pure we become so unanchored that we can drift into the realm of Being itself. “My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves; / I lose and find myself in the long water; / I am gathered together once more; / I embrace the world.”
This argument is challenged immediately by the book’s second section of poems, which are labeled “Love Poems.” This is an odd but telling fit for the book, a bald contradiction, as if to say that maybe the way to truth is not isolation, dissolution, unity with the natural world. Perhaps transcendence comes through the opposite: through romantic love, love of the singular Other. But this is a proposition not well-trusted by the book. The speaker imagines himself from the beloved’s perspective as an apparition, while figuring her as material, natural, actual being, calling her at one point “My lizard, my lovely writher,” and adding elsewhere the playful note about her sexuality, “Who’d look when he could feel? / She’d more sides than a seal.” But despite this, it is clear still, even in the poems that testify to the couple’s love, that the speaker’s loneliness abides. The truth of it sings through the clearest image in the love poem, which comes in the opening stanza of “The Happy Three”:
Inside, my darling wife
Sharpened a butcher knife
Sighed out her pure relief
That I was gone.
That knife resides in a very curious place indeed, Mr. Roethke, and while the comma declares that she is in the house and the knife is in her hand, the line break shades the ambiguous suggestion of a darker location, echoed in the rhyme that would identify wife and knife. And so we are back in the world where people are divided from themselves and from each other as if by blades.
Moreover, the solipsistic nightmare which is never stated in the escape to nature of the “North American Sequence” becomes clear here. See, for instance, “His Foreboding”: “I sing the wind around / And hear myself return / To nothingness, alone. The loneliest thing I know / Is my own mind at play.” Here the speaker knows that everywhere he looks he finds only the sterile reproduction of himself. His notion of meditation out of himself towards unity with all Being was a delusion.
And so we step into “The Abyss,” treated in the fantastic opening poem of the book’s third section. In it, the speaker looks right at this fear of the inauthentic life that is inauthentic precisely through its spiritual pretenses: “I have taken, too often, the dangerous path, / The vague, the arid, / Neither in nor out of this life.” The essential question for those who would seek the truth in this way is: “Do we move toward God, or merely another condition?” The only way to know is to confront the abyss, which is always right there with us: “The abyss you can’t miss: / It’s right where you are-- / A step down the stair.” Though the abyss is terrifying, it also holds a promise: “if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant, / The burning lake turns into a forest pool, / The fire subsides into rings of water, / A sunlit silence.”
So in Roethke’s telling, it is not only through an encounter with nature, or with another human being, that we find what redeems our humanity; we must also confront the abyss that separates us from the world. Only if we can stand to witness the abyss, having lost even ourselves in the effort, can we connect with the visible world rendered so precisely in the first section of the book as well as the hidden world beyond it. After all, “The Decision” asks, “What shakes the eye but the invisible?” There, on the other side of light, we find that “Being, not doing, is [our] first joy.”
In “The Right Thing,” the penultimate poem in the book, we come to yet another revised stance regarding self and searching. Here the speaker of the poems throws up his hands, declares it all pointless: “Let others probe the mystery if they can / Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will— / The right thing happens to the happy man,” because he, “praising change as the slow night comes on, / Wills what he would, surrendering his will / Till mystery is no more: No more he can. / The right thing happens to the happy man.” The final poem, “Once More, the Round,” promises that “everything comes to One, / As we dance on, dance on, dance on.” So, in the end, it doesn’t much matter how you try unify with the world; unify you will, eventually.
August 12, 2016
So many beautiful poems in this collection. One of my long-time favorites “The Rose” with its first lines,
“There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important –
Where the hawks sway out into the wind,
Without a single wingbeat...”
Each poem feels to me like a journey through a moment of observation of nature, and a longing to be freed into its beauty and rhythms and scope. An overwhelming desire to be free of himself and yet still be himself – something so many of us relate to.
“In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning...”
“Journey to the Interior”
“I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.”
“In Evening Air”
“There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important –
Where the hawks sway out into the wind,
Without a single wingbeat...”
Each poem feels to me like a journey through a moment of observation of nature, and a longing to be freed into its beauty and rhythms and scope. An overwhelming desire to be free of himself and yet still be himself – something so many of us relate to.
“In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning...”
“Journey to the Interior”
“I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.”
“In Evening Air”
December 27, 2021
Sighs, sighs, who says they have sequence?
Between the spirit and the flesh,--what war?
She never knew;
For she asked no quarter and gave none,
Who sat with the dead when the relatives left,
Who fed and tended the infirm, the mad, the epileptic,
And, with a harsh rasp of a laugh at herself,
Faced up to the worst.
I recall how she harried the children away all the late summer
From the one beautiful thing in her yard, the peachtree;
How she kept the wizened, the fallen, the misshapen for herself,
And picked and pickled the best, to be left on rickety doorsteps.
And yet she died in agony,
Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox's.
from "Elegy"
Theodore Roethke's posthumous collection The Far Field: Last Poems is a mixed-bag of provocative, powerful poetry alongside weaker poems which, given time and circumstance, may have been transformed from burgeoning concept to immortal verse had Death not been an active editor in the publication process. I especially enjoyed the "North American Sequence." I found the later two sections--"Mixed Sequence" and "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical"--reiterating the imagery and ideas within this opening sequence; as if, rather than finished poems, we are scrutinizing rough sketches and developing ideas.
Worth a reading--enough to interest me in seeking poetry he wrote when in the prime of his life and talents.
I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,
The children dancing, the flowers widening.
Who sighs from far away?
I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and hatred;
I would believe my pain; and the eye quiet on the growing rose;
I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive bird;
I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form;
I would be a stream, winding between great striated rocks in late summer;
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder of this mortal life,
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame,
And the dark be forgotten.
from "The Longing"
Between the spirit and the flesh,--what war?
She never knew;
For she asked no quarter and gave none,
Who sat with the dead when the relatives left,
Who fed and tended the infirm, the mad, the epileptic,
And, with a harsh rasp of a laugh at herself,
Faced up to the worst.
I recall how she harried the children away all the late summer
From the one beautiful thing in her yard, the peachtree;
How she kept the wizened, the fallen, the misshapen for herself,
And picked and pickled the best, to be left on rickety doorsteps.
And yet she died in agony,
Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox's.
from "Elegy"
Theodore Roethke's posthumous collection The Far Field: Last Poems is a mixed-bag of provocative, powerful poetry alongside weaker poems which, given time and circumstance, may have been transformed from burgeoning concept to immortal verse had Death not been an active editor in the publication process. I especially enjoyed the "North American Sequence." I found the later two sections--"Mixed Sequence" and "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical"--reiterating the imagery and ideas within this opening sequence; as if, rather than finished poems, we are scrutinizing rough sketches and developing ideas.
Worth a reading--enough to interest me in seeking poetry he wrote when in the prime of his life and talents.
I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,
The children dancing, the flowers widening.
Who sighs from far away?
I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and hatred;
I would believe my pain; and the eye quiet on the growing rose;
I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive bird;
I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form;
I would be a stream, winding between great striated rocks in late summer;
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder of this mortal life,
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame,
And the dark be forgotten.
from "The Longing"
January 24, 2021
Roethke’s last book, with the exception of several uncollected poems. Mostly longer poems here, with some short lyrics mixed in to somewhat leaven the reading pace. These poems strike me as more like meditations. I don’t have a particular favorite among them, perhaps just The Meadow Mouse, but like his earlier poems and shorter ones, he is highly readable and understandable. A good poet to read in order to get glimpses of both craft and ideas.
November 30, 2023
What’s greater, Pebble or Pond?
What can be known? The Unknown.
My true self runs toward a Hill
More! O More! visible.
Now I adore my life
With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,
With the Fish, the questing Snail,
And the Eye altering all;
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love’s sake;
And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
— Once More, The Round
What can be known? The Unknown.
My true self runs toward a Hill
More! O More! visible.
Now I adore my life
With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,
With the Fish, the questing Snail,
And the Eye altering all;
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love’s sake;
And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
— Once More, The Round
June 25, 2024
How could anyone have ever forgotten this man? I first discovered him in a poetry anthology on the Internet Archive (Essential Pleasures). Then, I found a used copy of this collection in my local bookstore and bought it on a whim. I am so glad I did. What a powerful American voice in poetry. His works are entirely, deeply rooted in an appreciation for the natural and a profound wonder and curiosity for (but never fear of) death. The “North American Sequence” is an almost inhumanly tight and thought-provoking series of poems. A perfect introduction to such a wonderful American poet. He holds such a deep love of nature, and his connection to nature is admirable. Wow. Just wow. So many thoughts.
December 18, 2016
Does not the apatite alter? I loathed Roethke's poems when I encountered them in my undergraduate reader. More than 40 years later I finally gave him a fair reading and am very impressed. These poems have a sensitivity for nature, thought, and feeling that simply sings to me until I get to the metaphysical lyrics that finish the book. As usual, most of these seem like metaphysical mumbo-jumbo except for "The Right Thing," which really gets that our world, and maybe the body /soul separation, are just different labels for part of the same thing. "The hill becomes the valley, and is still." Yes. Exactly. Lovely.
June 7, 2022
Mortality as a funhouse -- everywhere surrounding, death and death, but we see nothing but ourselves, stretched to eternity. These poems occupy a particular sweet spot for me between the abstract and the concrete. Their imagery is rich and vibrant, but Roethke twists pastoral scenes and love poems into elusive inward dives, cosmic tumults, bittersweet last breaths. His sense of lyricism, the cadence of the words, the musicality of sounds, is spellbinding.
Very absolute favorites: The Longing, Meditation at Oyster River, The Tranced
Very absolute favorites: The Longing, Meditation at Oyster River, The Tranced
December 25, 2022
All finite things reveal infinitude:
…
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
///
How is it, that a few lines of poetry, could ease my anxiety of death? I stan Roethke.
…
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
///
How is it, that a few lines of poetry, could ease my anxiety of death? I stan Roethke.
November 20, 2018
Amazing!
May 25, 2023
At the beginning of reading this book I really had a dislike for Roethke's poetry. But goodness gracious that changed. This is masterful and has my whole heart. This is poetry that will grow with me.
August 19, 2014
The best section was the beginning "North American Sequence" especially the poem titled "The Rose". Roethke has a good command of sound and the elegance of words, but somehow the poems seem distant and false, like he didn't think at all or thought far too much about what he wanted to say. I didn't like the section "Love Poems" which I thought were the weakest ones in the book by far. They tended to rhyme without reason and have meters that made them feel trivial, without the technical display of writing a sonnet, villanelle, rondeau, or sestina. The best poems were very good, and "Mixed Sequence" had some really insightful pieces, but overall the book didn't speak to me either in content (as a consumer) or form (as a poet). Good but not great, not really recommended for people with similar poetic tastes to mine. If you like Roethke, it's a good book, but otherwise, you might want to try reading an individual poem or two first.
December 6, 2010
I recently reread (again) this fine collection of poetry and the complete 1948 The Lost Son & Other Poems. Simply amazing and beautiful poetry by one of my favorite poets. Roethke will be just someone I read over and over again--it has something to do with his attention to things, whether it be memory or weeds. I'm going to go so far this morning as say that the 5-sectioned "The Lost Son" is, for me, one of the truly enduring, great poems of the first half of the twentieth century. This time, my reading of his poems reminded me first and foremost what a great ear Roethke possessed, as well as an ability to take even the most serious subjects with a pill of delight and playfulness.
July 9, 2012
This collection, which was published posthumously, doesn't have any of Roethke's famous or especially haunting poems, but is still very readable. The last section reads like a more cheerful, more agnostic version of the Four Quartets. The last poem ("Once More, The Round") ends "And I dance with William Blake/ For love, for Love's sake;/ And everything comes to One/ As we dance on, dance on, dance on." If one is going to write this sort of poem, this is the best possible last word for one's poetic career.
December 23, 2010
An astonishing collection. Forget about the uber-anthologized "My Papa's Waltz." This is Roethke as he should be read. Grounded in a nature-based philosophy without getting too light and airy.
Compare it to Leaves of Grass. It's probably not quite as good, but it definitely stands above Pulitzer-winner American Primitive by Mary Oliver, which makes the mistake of exalting nature at the expense of saying much of anything about humanity.
This collection has plenty to say.
Compare it to Leaves of Grass. It's probably not quite as good, but it definitely stands above Pulitzer-winner American Primitive by Mary Oliver, which makes the mistake of exalting nature at the expense of saying much of anything about humanity.
This collection has plenty to say.
May 12, 2023
This is the only Roethke that I've read. I am more familiar with his students. I found it pleasant, often engaging. Nothing wrested my soul with astonishment. However, I thought that the last section was vastly superior to the rest of the book. I know little about Roethke, but in this section he gives the impression that he knows he is dying and these poems are more poignant. Certainly worth a read, especially since most view this book much more favorably than I.
June 6, 2008
There are many wonderful poems in this collection, but I especially loved his poems in the North American Sequence. Very deep and mystical, a search for identity and the connection between self and nature...
I also really like how birds play a role in so many of his poems; especially enjoyed his little ode to the birds in his yard in the poem All Morning!
Good stuff.
I also really like how birds play a role in so many of his poems; especially enjoyed his little ode to the birds in his yard in the poem All Morning!
Good stuff.
February 11, 2014
Pastoral poetry rife with bird and plant classifications, with some shorter love poems included for good measure. I enjoyed a couple of the brief poems in particular, including Elegy, a dark remembrance of a late relative, and The Restored, which is marked by a sharply-defined rhyme scheme and a repetition of imagery that does not feel formally constrained or forced. Good quick read.
February 28, 2019
There is no doubt that Roethke is brilliant, but his poems are not to my usual taste. I felt separated from them, and it was hard for me to relate and feel what Roethke wanted me to feel. I still appreciate what he does, though, and enjoyed a few of the poems.
March 2, 2009
Though Roethke isn't my favorite poet, this collection is outstanding.
Read
December 11, 2009I read this in college. Like Ted Hughes' The Hawk in the Rain, I don't remember it well.
January 10, 2015
Great book of poetry to start the year with. I enjoyed reading afew poems each day. First of this author I have read and will be looking for more of his works.
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