Theodore Roethke, "The Geranium"

OK, OK, you literalists, it's not a geranium . . . 

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/220.html

I’ve delayed posting Theodore Roethke’s “The Geranium” because it’s a downer. Also, I have some reservations or questions about the poem. I can imagine some readers’ criticizing it as self-indulgent or maudlin (just as I can imagine some readers' relating completely to the speaker's loneliness). I wonder if the turn to the housekeeper at the end is too sudden or too extreme. I'll have more questions in a minute, but for whatever reason, the poem has stuck with me for decades, maybe because its confession seems honest and convincing:

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine--

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she'd lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,

Her shriveled petals falling

On the faded carpet, the stale

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--


The dumb dames shrieking half the night


Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,


Me breathing booze at her,


She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--


And that was scary--


So when that snuffling cretin of a maid


Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,


I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,


I was that lonely.

Shapes of a Woman

Of course I have some questions. Do you hear a touch of dark humor in the poem? If nothing else, isn't there lightness in the very fact of Roethke’s presenting the geranium as a woman—a woman who leans her head out the window to escape the speaker’s boozy breath? In a movie, that would be funny.

The Loneliness of Right Field

The best humor has substance. There’s no doubting the poem has substance, but isn’t there also in some of the details an undercurrent of comedy? And doesn’t it work against any tendency the poem might have toward falling too emotionally into a Roethke abyss?

Inspecting for Hags and Cretins

In the poem's language, I wonder about 




"presumptuous" in the penultimate line. I think that I think it's unnecessary, intrusive and awkward. I hear it disrupting the line’s rhythm, but even more so it seems like dead weight in the content. The speaker is calling the maid a cretin and a hag, which seem like plenty of insult on their own. The many-syllabled “presumptuous” slows, overburdens, fattens and softens the bullets fired in “cretin” and “hag.”  (I know, I know, a proper scholar would have said "multisyllabic"). 

I can hear an argument saying “presumptuous” turns the humor back on the speaker. It’s a ponderous word from a verbalist, and many times a verbalist makes a fool of himself by being absurdly, ponderously verbal. 

That opens the door to hearing “cretin” and “hag” as self-mockery too. A man of  words (silent, not spoken words, but many of them) is labeling a laborer in terms that might have little meaning to her. Her world is work, action, behavior, tossing out what’s dead and what stinks. She might take exception if he called her "whoring bitch," but "cretin" and "hag"?  The speaker, by contrast, perhaps wallows a bit in his own anguish, over-thinking, over-verbaling and over-emoting with regard to it.

"In Full Bloom"? Are You Sure?

Even if he is overdoing it, it doesn't kill the legitimacy of his loneliness. Most of us have been where he is (more briefly and less intensely, one hopes), so we’re not likely to laugh off his extreme isolation. But at the same time we hear the author, if not the speaker, sensing that the dismissal of the maid might be too extreme, thus adding a hint, a wink of understanding of what’s reasonable and what crosses a line. Firing a housekeeper for tossing a rotten plant goes too far. The speaker’s action probably has a more dire impact on her than her moment of carelessness has on him.

It’s worth noting that this difference between an author and his speaker’s understanding of things was at the heart of my last post. I think Roethke shows more awareness of that difference than David Wagoner does in “To a Farmer . . .”.   In "The Geranium" the author-speaker disparity enriches the poem rather than confusing it. 

For those who especially like hearing works read aloud, here is Blue Mamie, presumably another lover of “The Geranium.” She reads it a bit too fast, I think, but her voice is good, and her presentation is clear and crisp:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1adr6_the-geranium-theodore-roethke_creation