MY PAPA’S WALTZ ,which I used last year in my Year 9 English class to explain metaphors, is one such poem….The image of the drunk father with his rough appearance beating time out on his son’s head at first seem like such a shop worn unimaginative clichéd scenario but Roethke’s restrained use of language and the rhythm of the words perhaps also imbued with an integrity of a scene that may or may not have been autobiographical.
Roethke images don’t slice, cut, or penetrate….They ingratiate themselves with your brain rubbing up against literary pleasure centers like a purring feline.
JOURNEY INTO THE INTERIOR is really just a collection of metaphors describing the complexity of self-examination….”I could do that you think” but I’m sure many musicians think the same thing about the early music of The Beatles….INTERIOR comes to a really interesting ending by the way.
THE RECKONING uses accounting imagery for a soul imbalance something I have done myself in poetic writing….THE WAKING and THE GERANIUM are examples of plain spoken homilies on life’s value and existence.
ELEGY FOR JANE shows that Roethke can produce emotion in the reader….I love the last line of this poem about a student of his who died in a horse riding accident when he acknowledges that he has “no rights in this matter” as he is neither “father nor lover”
Here are three of my favorite poems of his all on one page THE SURLY ONE, I KNEW A WOMAN, and IN A DARK TIME
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/delacroix/895/Roethke.html
And here’s a Theodore Roethke page with bibliography….
http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/187.html
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