A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke by Barillas William;Hirsch Edward;

Author:Barillas, William;Hirsch, Edward;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

(1–6)

This form is not the ottava rima of Yeats’s “Among School Children.” It takes its name, the Venus and Adonis stanza, from Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis (1593), which itself draws inspiration from, among other sources, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE). The decasyllabic quatrain was also a favorite of Davies, who uses it throughout Orchestra. And its conceit of the dance as a metaphor for the orchestration of life into patterns, as Jay Parini has observed, helps define the practice of appropriation in Roethke’s sequence (141). But the final rhymes of Roethke’s stanza slant here between “hum” and “room,” “ears” and “bears,” as do many of the other end rhymes of this poem, suggesting that the Elizabethan influence on these poems is indeed partial, that the appropriation of at least this formal element is incomplete and yet not less identifiable for it. (To be sure, Roethke uses slant rhymes often in his rhyming poetry, notably in “The Waking” and in “The Reckoning” [Collected Poems, 28], three quatrains rhyming chiefly with slant rhymes: gain/pain, sum/home, add/pad, pawn/down, fare/ are, secure/ poor.) But Roethke distinguishes “The Dance” from his sources in other ways.

Not only do Roethke’s rhymes often slant in “The Dance,” there are also discreet deviations from Yeats’s cadence in the poem. Roethke deploys trochees and anapests with great tact to disrupt the rhythm of the iambic pentameter. The results reinforce some conceptual breaks with Yeats:

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man

That made him think the universe could hum?

The great wheel turns its axle when it can;

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,

And I have made a promise to my ears

I’ll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

(1–6)

Roethke immediately breaks with the iambic stressing of second syllables in a metrical foot by deploying an opening anapest, thus placing his initial emphasis on the idea that the dance upon which the speaker is reflecting has lost some of its rhythm and suggesting that it has, perhaps, started to slow its pace. Moreover, this anapest allows these syllables to bump into each other, disrupting the orderly image of the dance as Davies has it to offer a glimpse of the dancers (i.e., syllables) in the dance (i.e., the poem) before order reasserts itself. Famously for Yeats, it was impossible to “know the dancer from the dance” (221). This conceit allows for the first literalism of Roethke’s poem to take shape in the image of dancers stepping on each other’s toes. The congestion on the dance floor is even worse in the third line, where “great,” “wheel,” and “turn” are each stressed. But form merges with content in the second stanza:

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide

Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,—

Or was that in a book? I think with pride:

A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice

In the same way: O watch his body sway!—

This animal remembering to be gay.

(7–12)

The initial trochee of the second line stresses the ecstatic over the static in the image of a bear gaily sliding down a hill.

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