Books: Last Poems

THE FAR FIELD by Theodore Roefhke. 95 pages. Doubleday. $3.50.

“What I love is near at hand, / Always, in earth and air,” Theodore Roethke wrote in the title poem of this last collection. What he loved was growing things (no important U.S. poet since Thoreau has been less citified) and their textures. What he celebrated was his love for his young wife (now 38, she had been his student at Bennington College, where he taught English). And what he feared was death.

And as death approached (he died last summer, aged 55, of a heart attack), his poems seem to have taken on a new clarity of line and image, a new depth of tone. In these poems, written in the last seven years of his life, he lovingly and lingeringly catalogues objects: surf and “the falling of small waters,” fields and abandoned farms, vireos, warblers and “the heron’s hieratic fishing,” the greenhouses and roses of his florist father remembered from his Michigan boyhood. Musical in themselves, these flashing descriptions are presented almost brusquely, so that they may seem at first to be curiously opaque and lacking in resonance.

But the resonances somehow develop with rereading. Then Roethke’s driest lines can blossom as unexpectedly as the desert cactus. One of his repeated, even self-conscious influences in such passages is Walt Whitman (“Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues / . . . the terrible hunger for objects quails me”). But for Roethke, “all finite things reveal infinitude,” and . . . 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.

Beyond Whitman, the poems poignantly betray Roethke’s consciousness, like Andrew Marvell’s, of “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and Roethke cannot even playfully think of love without remembering death. The Wish for a Young Wife is characteristic:

My lizard, my lively writher,

May your limbs never wither,

May the eyes in your face

Survive the green ice

Of envy’s mean gaze;

May you live out your life

Without hate, without grief,

And your hair ever blaze,

In the sun, in the sun,

When I am undone,

When I am no one.

In a concluding sequence, which he frankly labeled “sometimes metaphysical,” Roethke was on fire with God. “What shakes the eye but the invisible/ Running from God’s the longest race of all,” he wrote. And in a voice of anguish and protesting confrontation rarely heard in poetry since Donne called on his deity to “batter my heart, three person’d God,” Roethke cries:

Godhead above my God, are you there still? . . .

From me to Thee’s a long and terrible way.

I was flung back from suffering and love

When light divided on a storm-tossed tree.

Yea, I have slain my will, and still I live;

I would be near; I shut my eyes to see;

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow

Upon that God who knows what I would know.