A friend, an actor with the sense of beauty and of rhthym that can go with being an actor, ranks Theodore Roethke (1908-963) as her favourite poet. Various critics called him the greatest American poet, ahead of Walt Whitman. That seems to me to go too far. I have long known his poems, but I was particularly taken by The Flight, a poem I read a few weeks ago in The Rattle Bag. (I will share it soon.) I liked the lines: “Tell me:/ Which is the way I take;/Out of what door do I go,/Where and to whom?” I was prompted to find the book from which the poem came, and I tracked down The Lost Son and Other Poems, which Roethke published in 1948 and is described his “breakthrough book.” The book is not in print now, and I feel almost as if I have found a lost sacred text. Roethke wrote that the greenhouse “is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.” The influence of the greenhouse, its flowers, scent, soil, and the creatures that live among its petals and leaves is obvious from the first page. Here are two extracts from poems that I have typed out as a theology scholar copies The Talmud.

From The Long Alley

Come littlest, come tenderest 

Come whispering over the small waters,

Reach me rose, sweet one, still moist in the loam,

Come, come out of the shade, the cool ways,

The long alleys of string and stem;

Bend down, small breathers, creepers, and winders;

Lean from the tiers and benches,

Cyclamen dripping and lilies.

What fish-ways you have, littlest flowers,

Swaying over the walks, in the watery air,

Drowsing in soft light, petals pulsing.

From A Field of Light

The salt laughed and the stones;

 The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,

The lovely diminutives.

I could watch! I could watch!

I saw the separateness of all things!

My heart filled up with the great grasses;

The weeds believe me, and the nesting birds.

There were clouds making a rout of shapes across a windbreak of cedars,

And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.

The worms were delighted as wrens.

And I walked, I walked through the light air’

I moved wit the morning.