Theodore Roethke's "Praise to the End!" Poems

Abstract

I'll take as my starting point an entry Roethke made in his notebook at the time he was writing the to the poems: 'To go back is to go forward.1 In these poems, regression is also progression; time loops back to gather itself as it goes forward to meet itself. itself' that time loops back and gathers lies in the pre-history of the world as well as in Roethke's childhood. landscape of the poems is both the greenhouse operated by Roethke's father in Saginaw, Mich igan, and the primordial wilderness previous to the rise of civilizations; and the in scape of the poems is both the emotional state of Roethke as an adult and the childhood experience of life as an undifferentiated whole previous to the emer gence of adult consciousness. Children lose this undifferentiated whole as they grow into adulthood. One must go back and recover it in order to become a full man. To go back is to go forward. to the poems are a developmental sequence of fifteen long, experimental poems about childhood and the growth out of childhood into adoles cence, first published completely in Waking: Poems 1933-1953 (1953). Four of the poems were initially published in Lost Son (1948), and the whole se quence except for the last poem, Thou Opening, O, was published in to the (1951). In Roethke's arrangement (which was not followed in the posthumous Collected Poems), the sequence is divided into two major sections, the first consisting of Where Knock is Open Wide, I Need, Bring the Day! Give Way, Ye Gates, Sensibility! La! and O Lull Lull Me, and the second consisting of The Lost Son, The Long Alley, A Field of Light, The Shape of the Fire, Praise to the End! Unfold! Cry, Love! and Thou Opening, O. Taken as a whole, the sequence repre sents one long poem, each part of which (that is, each poem) contains and reaf firms that whole. movement of progression and regression, of going forward and going back, occurs rhythmically in each poem and in the overall sequence in such a way that the sequence sways as a tree does, with a unified gradation of movements and counter-movements, from the small and quick to the large and ponderous. What gives this sequence its vitality is that its regressions carry the poet and the reader?and the language of the poems as well?back into that timeless childhood experience of life as an undifferentiated whole, as a radical means of recovering that experience for everyday life. Whole is an abstract word; as an experience,