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Critical Studies
Drawing Music from Penny Fiddles, or, a Biographical Account of Robert Graves and Theodore Roethke’s Secret Lives as Children’s Poets with a Look at their Neglected Masterworks, The Penny Fiddle and I Am! Says the Lamb, along with a Few Other Things
Abstract: This essay brings into conversation the lives of Robert Graves and Theodore Roethke, two oddly similar yet dissimilar poets, and argues that by exploring the many correspondences within their lives and work, we may deepen the growing discussion of Graves’s children’s work while broadening it to illuminate the children’s works of Roethke, which have yet to have been substantially reappraised.
Keywords: English poetry, American poetry, children’s poetry, literary biography
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Robert Graves and Theodore Roethke seem an unlikely pair. They didn’t travel in the same circles, nor are they commonly linked in academic discourse. Nevertheless, they have more in common than most would suspect. Their work was profoundly influenced by nursery rhyme, nonsense, and folk poetry, influences that corresponded with their serious interest in childhood and childhood’s poetry. In the span of two years, each published an extraordinary collection of children’s poetry: The Penny Fiddle (1960)
Like I Am!, Robert Graves’s The Penny Fiddle pulls no punches. Sweetly archaic and even old fashioned in places (even for 1960), The Penny Fiddle still manages to speak to its child readers of love and death with a candour that might alarm twenty-first-century audiences.
How and why
Poets die,
That’s a dismal tale:
Some take a spill
On Guinea Hill,
Some drown in ale.
Some get lost
At sea, or crossed
In love with cruel witches;
Yet some attain
Long life and reign
Like Popes among their riches.
The relevant prognostications occur at the end of each stanza (for Roethke, line six; for Graves himself, lines ten to twelve). You see, although Roethke was thirteen years younger than Graves, he would die twenty-two years before him. (Roethke lived from 1908 to 1963; Graves from 1895 to 1985.) Roethke was a heavy drinker throughout his life, but during his final years ‘he was frequently in a state of manic excitement’. He self-medicated with alcohol, drinking ‘a good deal to control’ his mania, often taking ‘a glass of beer the first thing in the morning’.
It’s unclear exactly how Roethke felt about Graves’s poetry, but we find evidence of his increased interest in Graves around the time Roethke began writing for children in earnest. Published three years before I Am! Roethke’s Words for the Wind (1958)
Been reading [Robert] Graves and [Wallace] Stevens lately, and damned if I don’t think both are over-rated. I get so tired of Stevens’ doodling with a subject-matter – the same subject-matter. And Graves, while at least he’s specific, is usually thin, I think.
While by no means praise, his assessment grants both Graves’s reputation (one tends to reserve over-rated for those who are highly esteemed) and his poetical exactness (specificity), which was a characteristic Roethke admired in poetry. Furthermore, while usually unguarded in his literary opinions, here Roethke marks his chief criticism (thin) with the qualification, ‘I think’. A year later in ‘How to Write Like Somebody Else’ (1959), Roethke reveals his familiarity with Graves by way of praising W. H. Auden. He asks the rhetorical question, ‘Is Auden a charlatan because he read and profited by reading [Wilfred] Owen, Laura Riding, Robert Graves’?
During this period Roethke also made regular use of Graves’s poetry in his courses at U. W., where Roethke taught for fifteen years. In The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, Allen Seager reproduces some student notes taken in one of Roethke’s U.W. seminars. At the top of the page in pen are the student’s handwritten words: ‘Class Goodies’. A preponderance of said goodies concerns poetry (for example, the student records Roethke’s characterisation of poetry: ‘memorable speech’).
The English Galaxy edited by [Gerald] Bullet [sic] in the
Everyman edition
Robert Graves Poems chosen by himself [sic] in the Anchor
edition
Yvor Winters collected poems [sic] Swallow Press.
The fourth is ‘Louis Untermeyer’s combined anthology of British and American Poetry. The earlier edition that they always ordered not the last one’.
Theodore Roethke isn’t mentioned in Graves’s biographies, but, frankly, for much of the twentieth century mentions of Graves’s life as a children’s poet have appeared only slightly more often in the discourse surrounding Graves’s own life and work. And if Graves isn’t mentioned often in treatments of Roethke’s life, neither are Roethke’s children’s books, something rather strange that they also have in common, along with a penchant for thinking of themselves as bears. (Something we’ll return to in a moment.) Doubtlessly, Graves was familiar with Roethke’s work (a voracious reader invested in keeping up with developments in the poetry world, Graves surely read Roethke’s The Waking, which was awarded the Pulitzer in 1954),
The back cover of Party at the Zoo briefly characterises the series, bragging that Untermeyer had put together ‘a unique new series for the beginning reader by such world-famous authors as Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, and Robert Graves’. Its uniqueness lay not only in its stable of extraordinary authors, but also in the fact that the books married those authors with reading specialists. Following the example of the Harper and Brothers’ I Can Read Books and Random House’s series of Beginner Books, those specialists sent their authors limited vocabulary lists, akin to the approach Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel) used to produce his 236 word The Cat in the Hat (New York: Random House, 1957). Unfortunately, as Lissa Paul explains,
The series fizzled out within a couple of years, despite the fact that the famous American poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer had managed to attract manuscripts from some of the literary giants of the day […]. The reading specialists employed for the project had no qualms about sending controlled vocabulary lists to famous authors. Those who obeyed wrote terrible books. Those who resisted often wrote terrific books – which, sadly, sank with the series.
Of The Big Green Book and Party at the Zoo, Graves’s is obviously superior (Roethke was one of the Modern Masters who dutifully limited himself to a circumscribed vocabulary, in his case, a list of only 268 basic words). Both books appeared just as the two poets became more professionally invested in publishing for children. The Big Green Book was published in 1962, two years after The Penny Fiddle. However, Michael Joseph reminds us that:
Although Graves wrote poems he hoped to publish for children as early as 1916, […] it was not until he had produced The Big Green Book (1962) […] that he gathered them into two slim volumes, The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children (1960) and Ann at Highwood Hall (1964).
And yet, again, not much attention was paid to Graves’s children’s work over much of the twentieth century, another correspondence he shared with Roethke: but as the twenty-first century has deepened, we’ve seen increased study of Graves the children’s writer, in general, and of Graves the children’s poet, in particular. This interest has been driven by the scholarship of Michael Joseph, whose work certainly inspired this essay.
Still, Robert Graves’s early interest in nursery rhyme has often been hedged or downplayed, even in very recent studies of his life and work. For example, in Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s 2018 biography, Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-Bye to All That 1895-1929, Graves’s abiding preoccupation with the ‘joyous foolery’ of the nursery rhyme
Similarly, when Roethke’s children’s poetry is mentioned at all in the criticism and scholarship surrounding him, it is relegated to footnotes and parentheticals, as if an embarrassment. This hesitance to explore children’s poetry is common in the world of adult poetry criticism and scholarship – especially in the United States. Readers of The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015) will not encounter a single chapter focusing on an individual children’s poet, and one could read the lone, extended treatment of Theodore Roethke and come away completely ignorant of Roethke’s forays into children’s poetry.
Roethke was an imposing figure with incredible earthly appetites. In ‘Fifty Years of American Poetry’, Randall Jarrell, surely inspired in no small part by Roethke’s cherubic, pinchable cheeks, famously characterised him as a ‘sometimes babyish’ poet. However, Jarrell clarifies that Roethke ‘is a powerful Donatello baby who has love affairs, and whose marsh-like unconscious is continually celebrating its marriage with the whole wet dark underside of things’.
Roethke embraced this persona. Seager points to Roethke’s 1960 interview with Zulfikar Ghose, an interview in which, Seager explains, Roethke ‘reveals the picture of himself he wanted to show the public then’ (Seager, p. 268). The piece is called ‘Roethke: I Ran with the Roaring Boys’ and begins, ‘Roethke is a large man with an attractive head, round-cheeked, and thinned greying hair. He has a deep sonorous voice with an incantatory ring about it’ (qtd. in Seager, p. 268). Again, Roethke embraced his size, his deep voice, liking to imagine himself ‘as a sort of dancing bear’, a beast of a man animated by a love of wine, song, and poetry.
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. (pp. 5-6)
His use of ‘romp’ here is telling. In the ‘Greenhouse Poems’ section of I Am!, we find another poem concerning dance, ‘My Papa’s Waltz’, in which Roethke also uses the word (‘We romped until the pans | Slid from the kitchen shelf’), tying it both to difficult, yet ultimately joyful familial love and the Dionysian appetite for drink that makes the aforementioned love so difficult (Roethke embodied that difficulty in the meter: ‘We romped until the pans’ is perfectly iambic, whereas the pans slide from the shelf trochaically. However, despite the substitution, ‘Slid from the kitchen shelf’ retains the drunken waltz’s three strong beats, ending smoothly with two iambs). Roethke would come to share this appetite with his father: you’ll recall the mint juleps he prepared on the day he died, wading in a pool like a bear (Seager, p. 285). Such waltzing may not be easy, but it is fun while it lasts.
A large man, Graves too saw himself in bears. However, it wasn’t only for their ‘shaggy and ungainly’ physique, as Robert Lowell put it (here thinking of Roethke) (Hamilton, p. 335). Rather, Graves found an additional set of behavioural correspondences: a kind of headstrong, bearish territoriality writ as poetic discrimination. Both Graves and Roethke wrote poems about bears, and both poems concern territoriality and a virtuous yet stubborn dedication to their peculiar ways: Roethke’s ‘The Lady and the Bear’ (from I Am!) and Graves’s ‘To Be Called a Bear’ (from Collected Poems, 1914-1947)
A mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one’s the mockingbird? Which one’s the world?
Just as Roethke and Graves saw themselves in bears, Jarrell saw something of himself in the mockingbird, and part of what he saw is the very poetic territoriality found in Graves’s tree-gashing bears. Jarrell explains:
I’ve known a lot of artists and poets… and… I write poetry myself—or anyway, I write verse myself… . Several times when I’ve talked with writer friends about [The Bat-Poet] I’m amused to see how they immediately identify with the mockingbird. (Laugh) […] Territoriality at its strongest is in mockingbirds… (pause) So, it seemed to me that…’ mockingbirds are not only more like artists than other birds, they’re more like people too.
Graves’s bears mark ‘their own hunting grounds’ as assiduously as the ‘Pee-culiar’ bear in Roethke’s ‘The Lady and the Bear’ defends his way of fishing:
A Lady came to a Bear by a Stream.
‘O why are you fishing that way?
Tell me, dear Bear there by the Stream,
Why are you fishing that way?’
‘I am what is known as a Biddly Bear, –
That’s why I’m fishing this way.
We Biddly’s are Pee-culiar Bears.
And so, – I’m fishing this way.
The lady is so shocked at the bear’s technique that she ‘slipped from the Bank’
And fell in the Stream still clutching a Plank,
But the Bear just sat there until she Sank;
As he went on fishing his way, his way,
As he went on fishing his way.
Robert Lowell often addressed his letters to Roethke ‘Dear bear’ (Hamilton, p. 335), so Roethke’s use of ‘dear bear there’ (doubtlessly encouraged by the triplet rhyme) clearly signals its biographical significance. The lady’s shock and the bear’s undaunted response provides insight into the singlemindedness of the practicing poet, even in the face of criticism (and evidence of Roethke’s fearlessness about treating death in his children’s poems, a fearlessness Graves shares, as we’ve seen). Robert Leydenfrost’s illustration depicts our Biddly Bear smiling at the reader; of the lady, all that remains are two high-heeled legs jutting from the stream: unfazed by the lady’s fatal spill, the bear carries on ‘fishing his way, his way’.
Graves is also interested in pursuing his own mode of poetry in an equally ‘Pee-culiar’ way. After describing the bears’ purposeful mauling of trees – whose knotty roots twist into the chthonic depths even as their branches stretch skyward – ‘To Be Called a Bear’ notes that:
They follow the wild bees
Point by point home
For love of honeycomb;
They browse on blueberries.
The speaker asks, ‘should I stare | If I am called a bear’, adding, ‘And is it not the truth’? before characterising himself in a way that befits Roethke as well as Graves: modulating from the third person ‘they’ to the first person ‘I’, he writes, ‘Unkempt and surly with a sweet tooth’ (recall Lowell’s characterisation of bears as ‘shaggy and ungainly’), ‘I tilt my muzzle toward the starry hub | Where Queen Callisto guards her cubs’.
The story of Callisto, as told in the Katasterismoi (often attributed to Eratosthenes of Kyrene, likely incorrectly), fairly hums with the interpenetration of the high and low, the celestial and the mundane, the eternal and the corporal. The nymph Callisto, who pledged herself to chastity in honour of Artemis the hunter, was raped by Zeus, and when her pregnancy was discovered, she was transformed by Artemis into a bear. Graves calls her ‘Queen’, for she was the daughter of Lykaon, king of Arcadia, and – in the form of a bear – she would eventually give birth to Arkas, who would himself be named king. But Callisto was brought low by Artemis, and in the form of a beast, she would be hunted almost to death by her own son. Zeus, moved by her plight, rescued her, placing her among the stars in the constellation Ursa Major (Condos, pp. 362-63).
This is a rather Romantic impulse, one found also in Roethke, for the pair share a profound sympathy with Romanticism. In Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1999), Thomas Travisano contrasts Roethke’s Romantic impulses with his eponymous quartet. Of course, Travisano grants that they, too, were ‘preoccupied with […] the wonder and darkness of childhood’, but he stresses that they nevertheless ‘found Roethke’s work significantly more romantic’ than theirs (p. 17). Joseph locates a similar Romanticism in Graves’s work – specifically in The Penny Fiddle, noting that it
taps into a tradition that goes back to the anti-Augustan, anti-materialist poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, in whose works the social order is subverted to correlate poetry with material corruption and material corruption with transcendence. (Orphans, p. 14)
Indeed, both are particularly Blakean Romantics, summoning the binaries of innocence and experience only to deconstruct them, to fold them into one another even as they undermine the hierarchical thinking that tends to privilege one over the other. As Joseph writes (about ‘Allie’, the second poem in Penny Fiddle), ‘One might go so far as to argue that Graves wrote “Allie” as a sophisticated children’s poem, in a somewhat antiquated manner reminiscent of Songs of Innocence’.
Like Graves, Roethke was also enamoured with the short line, the accentual rhythms of folk and nursery rhyme, finding their rhythms, coupled with the rustic voice of the Wordsworthian everyman, perfect for his twentieth century variety of Romanticism. Roethke writes:
The decasyllable line is fine for someone who wants to meditate—or maunder. Me, I need something to jump in: hence the spins and shifts, the songs, the rants and howls. The shorter line can still serve us: it did when English was young, and when we were children. (On Poetry, p. 93)
These qualities are evident in his children’s poetry, as they are in Graves’s. In his forward to The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes,
The Penny Fiddle begins with its title poem (‘The Penny Fiddle’), and it operates, as first poems often do, as an articulation of the book’s aesthetic sensibility. More, it dramatizes the poetic enterprise. It concerns itself not with the writing of any particular poem, but rather with how readers transform poems into poetry, a mystery that confounds adults (even literary critics) as often as it does children:
Yesterday I bought a penny fiddle
And put it to my chin to play,
But I found that the strings were painted,
So I threw my fiddle away.
The poem’s eponymous fiddle is a small thing, a cheap thing (I recall Charles Bernstein once saying that poetry is the rare kind of text that devalues the paper on which it’s printed: a leaf of paper has some value, but print a poem on it and it’s ruined). So, is the fiddle a metaphor for poetry? In a way. As Joseph explains in ‘Poetic Nonsense: Robert Graves, The White Goddess and Children’s Poetry’, the ‘poem enacts a transvaluation in which the materially worthless thing is also, simultaneously, the sacred. Like the penny fiddle, a children’s poem can be both the medium of true, ethereal music and still only a toy’
Drew such music from the fiddle
With the help of a farthing bow,
That I offered five shillings for the secret.
But, alas, she would not let it go.
The poetry, really, lies in the music made using the fiddle, the experience that comes from reading a poem well. Unread, a poem is nothing. Or nothing more than a penny fiddle gathering dust in an old shop. However, reading alone does not transform it into something of value. The boy looks it over, is turned off by its painted strings, never seeks to draw music from them with its bow. It takes more than reading a poem to make it poetry: one must read it well.
In Poetic Unreason, Graves articulates what, to him, makes for a good reader of poetry, one like our gypsy girl. In this passage, he argues that ‘a well-chosen anthology should be [like] a medicine chest’, but he insists that ‘no medicine and no poetry can ever be effective without the consent and co-operation of the patient’ (p. 2). The poem cannot do all the work: it needs a sympathetic reader. As early as 1916, we have indications that this is Graves’s view of poetry. In ‘“Allie” and the Lost War’, Joseph points to a letter Graves wrote to Edward Marsh in which he writes, ‘I’ve been reading [Walter de la Mare’s] Peacock Pie again and it improves every time’. The text is unchanged, but what Graves brings to it has. Joseph reads Graves to be implying, ‘Peacock Pie isn’t terrible, once one begins to read one’s own meanings into it’ (‘Allie’, p. 254). Peacock Pie, like the penny fiddle, becomes something more thanks to Graves’s farthing bow, his open and generative manner of reading that makes meaning more than finds it.
Roethke’s I Am! opens with nonsense, poems designed to be read in the sympathetic gypsy girl way. Nonsense, as Michael Heyman explains, is a variety of poetry ‘that deals with indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning’,
It’s windy there, and rather weird,
And when you think the sky has cleared
– Why, there is Dirty Dinky.
Dinky serves as a kind of personification of the poetic sensibility as exemplified by nonsense: we delight in the strange idea of ‘weather’ inside a beard, be it windy or not, but when we ‘think the sky has cleared’, we realise that we’ve only thought it so: there is Dirty Dinky! The sky hasn’t cleared (or maybe it has); it depends on how we think. Yet no matter, Dinky is there whether we think we’ve cleared things up, made things mean, or not. This would seem to contradict Graves and his music-summoning gypsy girl: the poem’s meaning is forever deferred, the poetry a nut we can’t quite crack no matter the things we’ve thunk. Yet in nonsense ‘more “sensible” meanings [are] kept in balance by a simultaneous absence of such meaning’, as Tigges has it. Besides, there is more to this story, for the poem concludes,
You’d better watch the things you do,
You’d better watch the things you do.
You’re part of him; he’s part of you
– You may be Dirty Dinky
The bets are still hedged (we only may be Dirty Dinky, even as we’re part of him and he of us), yet the possibility is there. We might very well be the narrator of ‘The Penny Fiddle’, ready to cast away a piece of verse (or penny fiddle) because it’s cheap, its strings painted and practically worthless – or we might be the gipsy girl who takes the poem to chin and draws our farthing bow across those weird, painted strings, coaxing poetry from it. We may find that it isn’t so terrible once one begins to read one’s own meanings into it.
Graves makes clear his affinity for nonsense in Poetic Unreason, not only where he remarks that nonsense has found its way to children likely because ‘the nursery is the one place where there is an audience not too sophisticated to appreciate ancient myths and so-called nonsense rhymes of greater or lesser antiquity’ (p. 126), but also in his generous appraisal of Edward Lear, particularly his ‘Dong with a Luminous Nose’. Graves insists that ‘though there may not be found a Classical Scholar to admit it’, the poem’s protagonist is ‘essentially as tragic a figure as Cadmus of the Greek legend seeking his lost Europa, even a more painful one’ (p. 24). Continuing, he notes that it is ‘strange that Lear is treated less seriously’ than other great poets, asking, ‘who will say that the foolery in Edward Lear is less worthy of our tragic imagination than the terrible foolery at the crisis of King Lear’? (p. 24). One wonders what he would have made of Roethke’s ‘Dirty Dinky’, the meanings he might have made with ‘The Monotony Song’, also in I Am! Which begins,
A donkey’s tail is very nice
You mustn’t pull it more than twice,
Now that’s a piece of good advice
– Heigho, meet Hugh and Harry!
Here is another poem about death (and life – and the things we do between the two). Advice on how much one can safely irritate a donkey doesn’t apply when Hugh meets an otherwise gracious, talking bear. Hugh is quickly dispatched by said bear for calling attention to its tendency to shed: ‘Old Boy, you’re shedding hair, | And shedding more than here and there’. Our Bearish Roethke was no fan of critics, and neither is his poetic bear, who responds civilly at first, but eventually breaks the poem’s form (or at least bends it) by substituting a ‘Grrrr’! for a rhyming ‘fur’. (Neither rhyme exactly with far or are, but Grrrr rhymes with the missing fur, whose absence echoes the soon-to-be-absent Hugh, leaving us, as we’ll see, with nothing but Harry and the hair of our hairy bear, who doesn’t shed both here and there but somehow sheds more than here and there: nonsense!) Which is to say, the bear mauls poor Hugh into the next world:
Sir, you go too far,
I wonder who you think you are
To make remarks about my—Grrrr!
– And there was only Harry!
Harry himself is soon to die. At first it seems he dies from running up a wall that – like Hugh, like the word fur – isn’t there (or here):
This Harry ran straight up a wall,
But found he wasn’t there at all,
And so he had a horrid fall.
– Alas, alack for Harry!
But the line doesn’t read, ‘But found it wasn’t there at all’. Instead, Harry has a fall because he wasn’t there. Is the antecedent of the ‘he’ an anthropomorphised, oddly male wall? (It could be – an earlier piece in ‘Nonsense Poems’ anthropomorphises a ceiling, after all.) But perhaps not. Or perhaps Harry was gone before he arrived. Or maybe Harry simply wasn’t where the wall was (despite the first line in the stanza insisting that he ran straight up one). The meaning is summoned even as it slips away, much like the wall, like the word fur, like both Hugh and Harry. The nonsense moral is simple, if rather dark, and couched in uncertainty (I guess, sometimes, unless):
The moral is, I guess you keep
Yourself awake until you sleep,
And sometimes look before you leap
– Unless you’re Hugh or Harry!
We’re taken back to ‘Dinky’, or at least I am, for I find myself chanting and dancing in that ursine, Roethkeish way: ‘you’d better watch the things you do; you’re part of them; they’re part of you – you may be Hugh or Harry’.
Throughout The Penny Fiddle, poetry and song and the transformative power of both is evident. With ‘Dicky’, for instance, Graves offers a gloomy ghost story cast as a loose ballad. The rhyme scheme varies – sometimes abcb, other times abab – as does the meter, but with that variation comes its folksy feel, the sense it is an old country song rudely made for those who, as Graves writes, have not had their ‘natural sense of rhythm […] destroyed by the metronome of school-room prosody’ (The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes, p. iii). Our eponymous hero encounters a ghost with a ‘lean, lolling jaw’, wearing
Garments old and musty,
Of antique cut,
His body very frail and bony,
His eyes tight shut.
What is crucial, however, is how this strange creature (‘His face was clay […] | His beard, cobwebs’) comes to be. Yes, he’s a product of language, summoned by the very poem we read, but within the world of the poem he is also made by poetry, or, again, summoned by it, his appearance prefaced by Dicky playing childhood games (‘Twirling my stick’) while he sings ‘old country songs’. The ghost materialises in the very next stanza. Likewise, ‘Lift-Boy’ begins, ‘Let me tell you a story of how I began’, foregrounding the fact that this tale is a performance made of language (and one that, like Graves’s medicine chest in Poetic Unreason, depends upon ‘the consent and co-operation of the patient’ [p. 2]: let me tell you a story). The poem ‘What Did I Dream’ speaks of ‘The finest entertainment known’: dreams – if only the waking mind can somehow recapture them, keep ‘The fragments’ from ‘fly[ing] like chaff’, if only we can capture them, say, in verse. In ‘Jock o’Binnorie’ we meet a king’s ‘fool called Leery’, who tells ‘nine hundred tales | And found no others to tell’, yet when he ‘started from the first once more’, the king ‘knew it well’. Was his highness angry? No, for:
‘Old friends are best, dear Fool’, he cried,
‘And old yarns heard again.
You may tell me the story of Jock o’ Binnorie
Every night of my reign!’
These old yarns belong in the storehouse of traditional folktales: ‘old friends’ Graves knew and loved, whether cast in verse or prose. And, of course, there’s ‘Allie’. Joseph has given us an entire essay on this four-stanza, thirty-six-line poem: ‘“Allie” and the Lost War’, to which I’ve earlier referred. ‘At first glance’, he proposes, ‘Allie’ is a children’s poem; it ‘seems unambiguously an ode to lost childhood, and a variation on the ancient theme Northrop Frye calls the “Framework of all literature”’ (p. 252): ‘how man once lived in a Golden Age, […] how that world was lost, and how we someday may be able to get it back again’.
Allie, call the birds in,
The birds from the sky.
Allie calls, Allie sings
[…]
Allie, call the beasts in,
The beasts, every one.
Allie calls, Allie sings
[…]
Allie, call the fish up,
The fish from the stream.
Allie calls, Allie sings
[…]
Allie, call the children,
Children from the green.
Allie calls, Allie sings.
Here we have another poem about poetry. Allie does not make music with a penny fiddle, but draws it from within herself. Allie calls. Allie sings. Remember the gypsy girl: there, the poetry was the music she coaxed from the fiddle. Allie’s poetry, too, is the music she draws from her instrument, but in this case the instrument is her own body. Furthermore, the music is tied to language. A young Orpheus, Allie makes poetry, and that poetry reorders the world. This is an obvious point with which to end, so I may as well compound it with the coincidence that The Penny Fiddle precedes Roethke’s I Am! by only a year. If one were inclined to read one’s own meanings into that coincidence, one could argue that The Penny Fiddle performs the overture to I Am! More, one could decide that Allie sings Roethke’s I Am! into being. In her poem, Allie conjures the menagerie of creatures that populate both Roethke’s nonsense and greenhouse poems, and she does so by name: both share lambs, cows, minnows, and eels, and while no trout or goldfish, nor doves, hens, or robins appear in Roethke’s book, the more generic fish and bird certainly do. And among Roethke’s nonsense poems we even find ‘A Boy who had Gumption and Push | [who] Would frequently Talk to a Bush’. I mention Roethke’s Boy only because he’s a curious, Roethkeish version of Allie. Unlike Allie, who ‘call[s] the beasts in, | The beasts, every one’, our Boy communes with the vegetative world, no animals, but a bush and a bush alone; still,
Nobody Sniggered and Mocked
As Those Two quietly Talked,
Because Nobody Heard,
Not a Beast, Not a Bird, –
So they Talked and they Talked and they Talked.
Again, this is joyous foolery and nonsense. Like Graves and Roethke, however, I mean it seriously. Like Allie, I fashioned this essay as a call, as an occasion to summon Roethke and Graves from their rest, to place them on a nice beach in Mallorca and watch them ‘play by the water’s edge | Till the April sun set’, to imagine what we might hear should we listen in on them as they (like the Boy and the bush) Talk and they Talk and they Talk. We can never know, of course, what Graves would think of I Am!, the meanings he might make of it. And Roethke, too, has left us without commentary on The Penny Fiddle. However, we owe it to both Graves and Roethke, who spent so much of their lives bearishly devoted to thinking and thinking hard about nonsense, nursery rhymes, and children’s poetry, to attend to theirs. If we can’t overhear them talking, perhaps we should, like a kinder Zeus, place their collections in the night sky alongside the other fine books that form, point by point, the constellations of their poetic output.
Joseph T. Thomas, Jr, is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University. Thomas has published numerous essays and two books,Poetry’s Playground (Wayne State UP, 2007) and Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007). He can be found on Twitter @josephsdsu
NOTES
Then by way of contrast [to the love poems early in the collection], there is a handful of light pieces and poems for children. These are rougher than what most children’s editors prefer. The attempt – part of a larger effort – was to make poems which please both child and parent, without insulting the intelligence or taste of either.
Theodore Roethke, ‘Theodore Roethke Writes’, in On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke (New York: Copper Canyon, 2001), p. 32.
The majority of ‘The Nonsense Poems’ are original to I Am! Says the Lamb. Those seventeen poems represent the book in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Doubleday, 1966). The rest in the section are sourced from Words for the Wind, which contains the interlude Roethke points to above. Titled ‘Lighter Pieces and Poems for Children’, it includes ‘Dinky’, ‘The Cow’, ‘The Serpent’, ‘The Sloth’, and ‘The Lady and the Bear’.
com/2015/07/05/travel/robert-graves-found-perfect-tranquillity-in-majorca.html> [Accessed 7 April 2021] When [Lowell] first met Roethke, Lowell was full of his own bear jokes and thought it delightful that there should be a bear-poet more shaggy and ungainly than himself. For a period he addressed Roethke in letters as ‘Dear Bear’. (p. 335)