Books: Kin to the Bat

WORDS FOR THE WIND (212 pp.)—Theodore Roethke—Doubleday ($4).

The shape of a rat?

It’s bigger than that.

It’s less than a leg

And more

than a nose,

Just under the water

It usually goes.

Like the rat in his incantatory verse, Theodore Roethke writes poetry in which the meaning is just beneath the surface, with only the end of its nose showing. Perhaps the best of the U.S. poetic generation that is wedged between the spare witticisms of Wallace Stevens and the distempered howls of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Generation, 50-year-old Poet Roethke has restored simplicity to the tortured, packed lines of U.S. moderns. He has brought back melody to a poetry that was becoming as labored and dissonant as the twelve-tone scale.

His father ran a greenhouse in Saginaw, Mich., and Roethke spent his childhood in the steaming, close atmosphere of growing things. Perhaps as a result, his imagery has an easy intimacy with slugs, birds, frogs, snakes, and in his deep disaffection for the world of men, he often seems happier to inhabit that simpler world. “I’m sure I’ve been a toad, one time or another,” he writes. “With bats, weasels, worms—I rejoice in the kinship.”

In years of teaching, most recently at the University of Washington, Roethke has apparently found little to change his mind. He has no use for rationalism (“that dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys”) or for the machine-made world of organization men (“mutilated souls in cold morgues of obligation”). But to oppose them he offers nothing more than the slow, visceral, unthinking life of animal existence: “I care for a cat’s cry and the hugs, live as water.”

A big, lumbering hulk of a man, whose moods can range from desperate gaiety to black despondency, Roethke works slowly and painfully. This collection includes 34 new poems, written over the course of five years. Included is a series of love poems, a kind of epithalamium to his young wife, who was his student at Bennington. They are reminiscent in their intensity, in their bemused exploration of the interplay of passion and spiritual love, of the poems of John Donne.

Despite the simplicity of his syntax, Roethke is often as impenetrable as many another modern and lesser poet. If always seeming to promise more than any one poem entirely achieves, always seeming on the verge of breaking through his obscurities into the clear radiance of revelation, he still achieves more than most moderns can even hint at. His best lines have the directness of that other master of obscure simplicities, William Blake. Of hope: “My gates are all caves.” Of love: “The pure admire the pure, and live alone; I love a woman with an empty face.” Of the clear judgments of childhood:

Scratched the wind with a stick.

The leaves liked it.

Do the dead bite?

Mamma, she’s a sad fat.

But in the end, Roethke leaves the reader unresolved, perhaps because he is himself unresolved. His perceptions, however exact, add up to no coherent whole. His despair, however moving, is still too personal to be shared. As he writes in one of his latest poems:

Ghost cries out to ghost—

But who’s afraid of that?

I fear those shadows most

That start from my own feet.