As I said in a previous post, I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. This week it was Theodore Roethke’s turn. Browsing his six poetry collections, I of course find an abundance of themes:  his childhood and relation to his father, love of a woman, various dimensions of the self, and more. But the poems I’m most drawn to are the ones where he expresses what I’d call his mysticism—his longing for and then union with the divine.

Roethke didn’t find his way into mysticism right away. In “What Can I Tell My Bones?” from his 1958 collection, Words for the Wind, there’s a deep desire for connection with a beyond. A long poem (101 lines), it begins in a sort of darkness:

Oh my bones,
Beware those perpetual beginnings,
Thinning the soul’s substance;
The swan’s dread of the darkening shore…

Then comes questioning:

The wide streams go their way,
The pond lapses back into a glassy silence.
The cause of God in me—has it gone?
Do these bones live? Can I live with these bones?

After this allusion to the biblical prophet Ezekiel comes, finally, the longing:

Mother, mother of us all, tell me where I am!
O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song…

To try to become like God
Is far from becoming God.
O, but I seek and care!

It’s in Roethke’s final collection, The Far Field (1964), that he explores this seeking at length. Take these lines from “The Long Waters”:

In time when the trout and young salmon leap for the low-flying insects,
And a fisherman dawdles over a wooden bridge,
These waves, in the sun, remind me of flowers…

I have come here without courting silence,
Blessed by the lips of a low wind,
to a rich desolation of wind and water…

As light reflects from a lake, in late evening,
When bats fly, close to slightly tilting brownish water,
And the low ripples run over a pebbly shoreline,
As a fire, seemingly long dead, flares up from a downdraft of air in a chimney,
Or a breeze moves over the knees from a low hill,
So the sea wind wakes desire.
My body shimmers with a light flame.

I see in the advancing and retreating water
The shape that came from my sleep, weeping:
The eternal one, the child, the swaying vine branch,
the numinous ring around the opening flower…

Until, at the poem’s end:

I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,
Become another thing:
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.

So, water is the element in which Roethke imagines his “desire” and then his loss and recovery of the self as he “embraces the world.”

Other poems in this collection also draw on water imagery for the speaker’s intimations of the numinous. And on other elements of the natural world—as in the volume’s title poem, “The Far Field” (another long poem, of 103 lines). Its second section begins:

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turn drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, rusted pipes, broken machinery,—
One learned of the eternal…

From the “eternal” it’s a natural move into “infinity”:

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
the dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
the on-coming water.…

That “dying of time in the white light of tomorrow”: it’s a mind-stretching image for the beyond. As is the “weightless change” that follows:

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens…

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;…

Then the poem’s final section:

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea…

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute…

I love hearing in the waves that “murmur of the absolute”—and also the revelation that follows in the poem’s final stanza:

All finite things reveal infinitude
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow…
The pure serene of memory in one man—
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

We’ve come back to waters again—with that tiny ripple swelling to a winding around the world. What a marvelous image of the finite revealing infinitude.

The final section of poems in The Far Field, called “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical,” begins with the poem “In a Dark Time.” At first all is darkness: “I meet my shadow in the deepening shade”; “I know the purity of pure despair.”  Then light wrestles with the dark:

A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Having reached this “unnatural light,” the speaker must still rise into union with infinity—which happens in the poem’s closing lines:

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Roethke has come a long way. From “try[ing] to become like God” (in the poem “What Can I Tell My Bones?”), he has arrived at “The mind enter[ing] itself, and God the mind.”

It’s a journey I’ve treasured accompanying him along.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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