HER TIME
By Theodore RoethkeWhen all
My waterfall
Fancies sway away
From me, in the sea’s silence,
In the time
When the tide moves
Neither forward nor back,
And the small waves
Begin rising whitely,
And the quick winds
Flick over the close whitecaps,
And two scoters fly low,
Their four wings beating together,
And my salt-laden hair
Flies away from my face
Before the almost invisible
Spray, and the small shapes
Of light on the far
Cliff disappear in a last
Glint of sun, before
The long surf of the storm booms
Down on the near shore,
When everything—birds, men, dogs—
Runs to cover:
I’m one to follow,
To follow.
April is national poetry month, and I’ve not read nor written about a poem yet! So I looked over at the nearest book shelf, and my eyes found The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. When I opened the book, one I haven’t looked at in far too long, it fell open to this lovely poem, “Her Time.”
Roethke was a beloved teacher of poetry writing, awakening and helping nurture the joys of writing poetry in many a poet, including another favorite poet of mine, James Wright. He wrote hundreds of times as many words in notebooks and journals, working to be a deep observer of his life, to use anything and everything he encountered as potential vessels through which he could explore his inner self in poetry. He struggled with mental illness and numerous breakdowns and hospitalizations, but through it all, he left us his remarkable body of work, which I have spent the morning now leafing through, stopping again and again to scratch a comment or two in the margin, to underscore line after line.
In this poem, those first few lines immediately promise a journey I want to embark upon, that “when” setting up the first clause of the single, long sentence of the poem, the rhymes of “all,” “waterfall,” “sway away,” catching hold of my eye, that invented phrase, “waterfall fancies,” pushing us toward an emotion we have all likely experienced though perhaps never reached to find words for. And whatever these “fancies” are, the “sea’s silence” the immensity of the moment he is witnessing—all the lines to come—are the things that cause this “sway away,” those mundane “fancies" to take a back seat to what the oncoming sequence of imagery and events will bring him (and us).
The poem first describes a brief pause and stillness, where “the tide moves/Neither forward nor back,” everything suspended at high tide, but ready to turn, a moment filled with stored energy, the potential of movement, release. Then the “small waves/Begin rising whitely,” here again an invention, “whitely” an adjective transformed into an adverb even as the waves are transformed into something new, something more menacing with the rising winds. And as the sudden “quick winds” (such a simple gesture, to take a word like “quick” that we ordinarily attach to other nouns, but never to the “wind”) “Flick over the close whitecaps,” the “scoters fly low,/Their four wings beating together.” Simply by noting “their four wings” we see them, so close together it is as if they are a single, four-winged creature, and if you’ve seen pairs of ducks flying close together just above the surface the water, rushing to find safety as a storm brews, that image will immediately come to mind, conjured with these simple and all at once not so simple words.
Now, just as those “waterfall fancies” have “swayed away” by the sea’s silence, the subject’s “salt-laden hair/Flies away from my face/Before the almost invisible spray.” Roethke looks to the minutiae of the moment, the barely-there particles of mist, which then bring his eye to the “small shapes/Of light” that then “disappear in a last/Glint of sun.” I find it striking that these smallest of things are witnessed and highlighted for us just before the largest “thing” in the poem occurs—“The long surf of the storm booms/Down on the near shore”—all the expectation and suspension of the energy felt in the early lines of the poem erupting now in both motion and sound.
And as everything “runs to cover,” the persona of the poem, perhaps Roethke, perhaps whomever the “her” is in the title, “Her Time,” unless that “her” refers to the sea itself, thinks/expresses “I’m one to follow,/To follow.” Here I notice how the more standard “run for cover” becomes “run to cover” which allows the “one to follow” to stand more directly in opposition to that urge. And the whole of the poem has been “following,” looking deeply to the surroundings, the seen and unseen, the tide suspended, full, the feel of “salt-laden” hair swept away, the mist nearly invisible like the last moments of sunshine on the “far cliff.” The repetition of “to follow” suggests further that it is not just one thing he is “following,” but the multitude of small and large things that evoke the powerful emotion of the poem.
The poem doesn’t attempt to make grand proclamations of meaning; it simply locks a moment into place for us when whatever human “fancies” we feel vanish like those vanishing motes of light as the enormity of nature booms out and compels us to run to cover. But Roethke urges us not to run but “to follow” moments like this, moments where nature reaches out and grabs hold of us, making us feel as small and momentary as the nearly invisible sea mist, the last glints of sun. The poem makes me stop and note the steady sun of this already so-warm April morning, the greening trees, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker, the high call of the red tailed hawk nesting in the neighbor’s tree, and for a moment my “waterfall fancies” also “sway away,” and I’m left just following, following, immersed in a moment of wonder.
You can also BUY ME A COFFEE.