Theodore Roethke's Boyhood Home

While I was at Eastern Michigan, one of the requirements for graduation was that we take two literature classes.  For one of those classes, I decided to take a poetry class.   The professor was actually pretty good for that class and for the most part I enjoyed it.  But there were only two poems that stood out to me.  One was "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg (I would love to see a modern version of that some day).  The other was a poem called "The Pike" by a poet named Theodore Roethke.

Probably one of the reasons why that poem stood out to me was because the professor mentioned that he was from Michigan.  The other reason was that it was a very visual poem and I could imagine the person fishing and a pike striking.   Pike are pretty vicious looking fish (sadly, I don't have pictures of one readily available).

The poem is as follows:

The river turns,
Leaving a place for the eye to rest,
A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely,
And the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless,
Or drift lazily in and out of the weeds.
The bottom-stones shimmer back their irregular striations,
And the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer's eye.

A scene for the self to abjure!-
And I lean, almost into the water,
My eye always beyond the surface reflection;
I lean, and love these manifold shapes,
Until, out from a dark cove,
From beyond the end of a mossy log,
With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,
A thrashing-up of the whole pool
The pike strikes.
I figure that only a poet from one of the Great Lake states could write a poem about a fish but that is pretty cool.

As I took M-46 out to Muskegon last time, I noticed that I had passed the boyhood home of Theodore Roethke.  I knew that I would be taking M-46 again at some point to catch the places that I missed.  So this time I stopped to take a picture of the house.  As you can see, there is a Michigan Historical Marker in front of the house.

 One of the cool things about seeing some famous people's boyhood homes is seeing how unassuming they are.  It's hard to believe that someone so accomplished came from a place that looks like this (to really see what I'm talking about go to the Nixon Library sometime and see his boyhood home).

 He was born in 1908 in Saginaw Michigan.  His father Otto was a market gardener who owned a large greenhouse along with Theodore's uncle.  Many of Roethke's images come from this greenhouse.  His father died of cancer in 1923 and his uncle committed suicide in that same year.  Roethke was 15 at the time and as expected, both of these events shaped his life.  He would earn a B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan.  He was going to go to law school but then he went to Harvard.  He ended up abandoning his graduate studies because of the Depression and went into teaching English at various Universities.

In 1954, he won the Pullitzer for Poetry for his book "The Waking".  He would also win the National Book Award for poetry twice.  Once in 1959 for "Words for the Wind" and again in 1965 for "The Far Field".

He died in 1963 in Washington.  In 2012, he was honored on a US Postage Stamp as one of 10 Great US Poets.

The Marker in front of the house reads:
"Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." Roethke drew inspiration from his childhood experiences of working in his family's Saginaw floral company. Beginning is 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively, receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and two National Book Awards among an array of honors. In 1959 Pennsylvania University awarded him the 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. Roethke died in Washington in 1963. His remains are interred in Saginaw's Oakwood Cemetery.

 Next door to his house is his uncle's house.  I think this one is the more interesting of the two.

So if you get a chance, check out some of his poetry.