Open House

by Theodore Roethke

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

American poet Theodore Roethke published short lyrical works in The Waking (1953) and other collections.

Rhythm and natural imagery characterized volumes of Theodore Huebner Roethke. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking. Roethke wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." From childhood experiences of working in floral company of his family in Saginaw, Roethke drew inspiration. Beginning is 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively; he received two National Book Awards among an array of honors. In 1959, Yale University awarded him the prestigious Bollingen Prize. Roethke taught at Michigan State College, (present-day Michigan State University) and at colleges in Pennsylvania and Vermont before joining the faculty of the University of Washington at Seattle in 1947.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roethke’s first book. He works in formal rhyme and meter. The poems have the feel of someone starting out. He seems a bit strident at times. The subtlety of his later poems has not arrived.

[j · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began my reading of Roethke quite a while ago with his final collection of poems (which is a masterpiece), so it is very interesting to continue onward finally by reeling back all the way to his first. All of the poems here certainly fall into a specific funny category, which is "poems that sound like what people who don't ever read poetry imagine poems are like". Roethke writes about nature, describes air and wind, gives snapshots of moments with narrative implications. Two poems ('The Auction' and 'Sale') are about lives upended or ended, as embodied by the selling of a house's ephemera. Compared to The Far Field, there is a much narrower scope per piece. Who knows (maybe somebody) if before this Roethke went through a youthful phase of boundless, extravagant ambition -- but otherwise it seems like he was the type of artist who began in something like a pre-established mode, committed to clarity and precision, and progressed to be an involver of massiver ideas. Which is not to say these early poems lack ambition, or that those later poems lake clarity and precision. Au contraire...

My two favorites here are 'The Heron' and 'Night Journey'. The former is a poem of three stanzas. Performing a traditional rhyme scheme thoroughly only in the second, he suggests the insistence of less concrete "rhyming" in the first and third. The teeter totter of the language, both within individual moments (the phrase 'antic grace' is breathtaking) and within the structure of the place, come to mimic the described gait of the bird. The not-necessarily-expected rhyme completed by the final line of the poem, describing the ripples left by the bird's taking to flight, is a wonderfully simple stroke in place of some grand declarative finale. The bird's absence attests to its beauty as much as the clearer description does, and the adherence to or flirtatious denial of rhyme similarly evokes all the potentiality that the poet is able to wield -- whether explicitly rendered or left (beautifully? brutally?) unsaid.

The latter is a gorgeous and romantic depiction of a train ride. Every element of the poem, from the pace of the language, to the visual shape of the long, narrow, unbroken single stanza, is wholeheartedly committed to selling the majesty of the train. It works.

'The Bat' is also quite charming. Perhaps not at all serious, because it is a set-up with a punchline designed to make you laugh, but Roethke crafts it as carefully as he does the poems about death and the sublime and all those more serious things.

[Oisín · Rating 2 out of 5]

An impressive first collection, but it definitely reads like a first collection. Looking at the more serious poems, you can see Roethke almost as a middle point connecting Dickinson and Plath, albeit lacking the same level of formal accomplishment in their poetry. The poems explore the connection between the self and the external, pulverising the body through metonymy is Roethke's primary means of depicting the fragmentation of both. There is an understated darkness to this technique that is very appealing, and the simple meter really lends itself to that. Unfortunately, some of the other poems attempt humour, and are the poetic equivalent of bad teacher jokes – they're corny and self-congratulatory in their own sense of idiotic irony. These act as an anchor to the better poems of the collection; they're sprinkled throughout so any time it seems the book is gathering momentum, of the "funny" poems pop up to ensure that doesn't happen. They better poems are truly accomplished in achieving the desired aesthetic impact, and had the lesser poems been omitted, this would have been quite a prodigious debut, sadly Roethke came under the illusion that he was funny, and only part IV of the book survives as anything, as a whole, of significant worth.

[Salomeja Sandroschvili · Rating 3 out of 5]

რეტკეს დიდებულების დასაწყისი.


ეს ლექსი იმ დიდებულების ნაწილია და არა დასაწყისის:

Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.


My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.


The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witless agony.

ძველ დროში წავიკითხე ეს ლექსი და შემიყვარდა და ვფიქრობდი,
Nakedness my shield რას ნიშნავდა, shield როგორ უნდა იყოს nakedness და მერე, მერე გავიგე და ახლა შეკითხვის ნაცვლად პასუხად მახსენდება.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing that this is his first book of poems.

[İlker Şaguj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazmi Ağıl çevirisiyle İyi Şeyler'den çıktı, şahane kitap.

[Gideonleek]

The stethoscope tells what everyone fears:
You’re likely to go on living for years

[Matt Kovalcik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Indecipherable for me, rooted in nature but jarring in the snipped imagery that I couldn’t tie together.