Death as a Theme in Theodore's Roethke's Poetry

Theodore Roethke spent much of his childhood working and playing in his father's greenhouses. Later, he was to call the greenhouse "my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth" (Sullivan 22). Thus, ecological metaphors play a significant role in his poetry and he applies a theory of death as a transformation rather than an ending. In his earlier poems, such as "Cuttings," "Cuttings (later)," and "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," he focuses his attention on birth and growth, the first stages in the ecological process. However, even in these early poems, Roethke views the willful, tenacious struggle of plants into being as a drive against death (Sullivan 22). In his subsequent poems, such as "The Far Field" and "In a Dark Time," he explores the natural process of death in relation to the birth of the spirit. His final poems, such as "Wish for a Young Wife," seem to conclude that to love fully, which is the aim of life, one must undergo the death of the personal self.

Balakian argues that Roethke's early greenhouse poems have an organic shape (Balakian 51). At this stage, the intensity of action and interaction in the poems provides the elemental shape for his unfolding natural, psychic, spiritual, and poetic journey into self-discovery (Balakian 51-52). "Cuttings" is the opening poem in this sequence, and Balakian refers to it as Roethke's vision of an original condition. At this stage,

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quence, and Nordstrom argues that Roethke's treatment of death resembles the ecological concept of "succession," that is, the interrelated network of different life forms continuously taking over from one another (43). From an ecological viewpoint, individual death does not mean that life is extinguished; rather, the individual is merely transformed. Thus, Nordstrom argues that, in "The Far Field," although Roethke's personal "I" will die, his soul will be united with its source and recycled (43): Thinking: Once I was something like this, mindless, Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar . . . Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log, Believing: I'll return again, As a snake or a raucous bird, Or, with luck, as a lion (Roethke "The Far Field" 41-49). In this poem, Roethke's poetic "I" realizes that the essence of existence is consciousness; the biological form is of less importance (Nordstrom 45). In a symposium on "In a Dark Time," Roethke said that the poem was "the first of a sequence, part of a hunt, a drive toward God" (Ross-Bryant 166). Ross-Bryant states that, in the poems of North American Sequence such as "The Far Field," Roethke had turned his attention outward to arrive at inner peace and understa
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Approximate Word count = 1706
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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