Writer Jenny N. Sullivan is a garden club member from Northern Virginia and today's guest blogger. Enjoy! t
The
Green Force, Gardeners, and the Poetry of Theodore Roethke
by
Jenny N. Sullivan
Soon the leaves will be raked
into the street where they will vanish as the roaring vacuum truck crawls along
the curb. The lawn will be aerated and
the beds put down for the season. Then what is a gardener to do with no
pruning, planting, weeding or raking to make demands of time and energy? The wise
gardener can soothe that restlessness by visiting the poems of Michigan poet
Theodore Roethke, a man who grew up with a German immigrant father who owned
and operated 250,000 square feet of greenhouses in Saginaw. That’s right, almost six acres of greenhouse,
the largest compound of greenhouses in Michigan at the time. Young Theodore, born in 1908, also had the
run of 22 acres of open land behind his house as well as woods and wetland his
father owned.
Perhaps it was inevitable that
Roethke, once he began writing poetry, would write about plants. A collection
of these poems has come to be known informally as his “Greenhouse Poems,” even
though many poems go beyond that single location, as their provocative titles
make clear. He writes about a “Root Cellar,” about a “Weed Puller,” and about
“Transplanting.” Other poems with horticultural titles such as “Moss-Gathering,” “Orchids,” and “Child on Top of a Greenhouse,”
among many more, are irresistible to anyone who loves flora and the tending of
it.
Roethke was interested in
observing what Stanley Kunitz called the “green force” of a leaf or flower or
stem. The poet was in awe of that force, saying in one poem that it caused him
to “quail.” Many of us who cannot write poetry feel the same way about the
“green force” and can relate to what he describes in, for example, his poem “Cuttings.”
Anyone who has successfully propagated a
new plant from a cutting appreciates the joy this poem conveys. This cutting, a thing that looks like a mere
“stick,” is only sleeping, “in-a-drowse.” But put it into a good mixture of
“sugary loam,” loose like sugar, to a gardener also sweet like sugar, and see
what happens. The plant drinks
nourishing water until, in a beautifully restful and satisfying monosyllabic
line of the poem: “The small cells bulged.” The closing stanza gives the reader
an image like time-lapse photography of the growing plant pushing through the
potting mixture to unfurl its glorious, delicate new self, its “tendrilous
horn.” I too “quail.”
Roethke’s poem “Root Cellar” is best
appreciated by those who love compost piles and natural fertilizer, those who
can respect and admire a good manure. In this root cellar, “dank as a ditch,”
things are growing uncontrollably, like those store-bought onions sprouting in
the cabinet under your counter in spring. To some, Roethke’s root cellar would
be just a dark and smelly place. The poem calls it “a congress of stinks.” To
lovers of plants, that organic material is a repository of energy. That energy comes from the plants that have grown
beyond ripeness to pulpiness and decay to become “silo-rich.” In decay and death, they feed new life. Why,
even “the dirt kept breathing.”
Many
gardeners grew up loving plants because a parent or grandparent nurtured this
love in us. Theodore Roethke gives us a stunner of a moment from his childhood with
his father in the greenhouse in an excerpt from “The Rose.” “And I think of
roses, roses…/And my father standing astride the cement benches,/Lifting me
high over the four-foot stems…/What need for heaven then,/With that man, and
those roses?”
Roethke’s collected poems are available from
major booksellers and can be found on the shelves of the public library. They
are well worth picking up and reading this winter when snow covers everything
and the ground is rock solid. They are the perfect cold weather companion for the
housebound gardener sitting at the window, by a warm fire, occasionally
glancing out at the fallow yard.
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