'All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude' - Theodore Roethke

Last class period, I was given a personal assignment by Dr. Sexson to explore and analyze another poem by Theodore Roethke, 'The Far Field'. Should anyone care to read the poem, I will include the poem in its entirety at the end of this blog. The poem reminded me of an experience I had when I was very young and seemingly incapable of understanding anything with any sort of depth.
I can't remember how old I was, but I know I was still in the phase of 'Sesame Street'. My Grandpa James passed away (my mother's father), and I remember my mom trying to explain the concept of death. I was always a persistant child and would ask question after question if I didn't understand what was going on around me. When I finally came to the realization that my Grandpa was gone and never coming back, I was absolutely hysterical. I remember my mother trying to console me as I hugged a big pillow with the 'Sesame Street' characters smiling at me from the fabric. In that moment, I began to understand that in life there is death, in death there is peace, but no one actually knows what happens after death. Once a person passes away, they never return, and the world keeps going on without them. Big questions kept racing through my mind; what would happen to the world eventually? Would I still exist in another realm or just be a small void on the planet? Would there come a time when the earth wouldn't exist? And then what? What comes after? Does anything come after? This was all incredibly overwhelming for me and I stayed in my room most of the day crying and trying to find some solace in my newfound reality. The next day, of course, I had forgotten all about it and was back to the 'usual'.
You're probably wondering why this has anything to do with the Roethke poem, and I will try to explain as best I can. In 'The Far Field', Roethke describes a man coming to understand things around him as he hadn't before, and understanding death in a different way. He recognizes moving from a state of innocence ('once i was something like this, mindless') to a state of absolute understanding. The man in the poem finds comfort in the idea of death. Would it be better to continue living knowing the unknown will always exist, or would death be more peaceful?
Roethke states that 'all finite things reveal infinitude', which is something I realized as a small child trying to come to terms with death. Death is a finite concept but the idea of infinitude after death absolutely overwhelms my senses (it did then and it still does now). I try not to let my mind wander in that direction too much because my mind works in overdrive and I feel like I'm suffocating.
In his poem, Roethke describes the beauty of this feeling, of knowing that in every thing and concept exists something that isn't absolute; something that continues beyond that thing or concept. The author feels renewed by the thought of death because he knows death is not the end. Something exists after death; but only in death can we ever know what that something is.
The poem is wonderful... everyone should read it. It really applies to the idea of 'epiphany' and, I'm sure, other ideas we will be kicking around this semester. Hope you guys enjoy it (and thank you, Dr. Sexson, for introducing me to it).

THE FAR FIELD

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.