Brad Leithauser's review (subscription required), in the NYRB, of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-1963, includes the following unknown (to me) poem:
My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.
Of the poem's 54 words, 44 have one syllable, and the other ten have two. Look at the last three lines. Fifteen words, twelve of which have three or fewer letters. As the poem follows its brief course the language becomes more severely spare until, toward the end, the very simplest words are repeated in rhymes and near rhymes--"when," "when," "sun," "sun," "undone" and "one." Something about the last two lines, the brevity and simplicity and the way they only almost rhyme, expresses what the poem is about without saying the words: dissolution, sorrow, resignation, and love. A nursery tale for adults.
We learn from Leithauser that Roethke, at age 44, married a woman, 27, a former student of his, and that the marriage "seemed to save him." So there is an autobiographical angle to consider, too. I married a 25-year-old when I was 48, which may account partly for my warm response, but it is Leithauser who says "Wish for a Young Wife" is one of the most haunting short love poems he knows. The praise seems to me if anything too tame. Here is Shakespeare in a poem on a related theme. The praise due Roethke is that his is just as good.
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