Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini

Author:Jay Parini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Theodore Roethke
ISBN: 0870232703
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1979-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

The interior dialectic reappears, as before, when the hero is balked. The questions are the same in essence: how can the hero find gratification for his desires? The responses are maddening: “Look what the larks do” is unequivocal. They sing. “Return the gaze of the pond” proposes narcissism. This advice causes isolation and despair. “When the appeal fails,” says Rosemary Sullivan, “the poet is thrown back to the lonely solipsism of sexual hunger.”18 The resulting frenzy finds expression, as it did in “The Lost Son,” in nursery rhymes and riddles.

The note of despair carries over into the third section. The boy-hero asks, “Can feathers eat me?” and reveals a terror of the natural world. He admits that he has exhausted the rich depths of memory for a time: “There’s no clue in the silt.” So he enters the game of social interaction. The central stanzas of this section play on the rhythms and rhymes of childhood:

A waiting ghost warms up the dead

Until they creak their knees:

So up and away and what do we do

But barley-break and squeeze.

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