Robert is right, I made a new poem in the blurry depths of my memory out of "The Waking" and "My Papa's Waltz," and now that I think about it this seems to me something of a worthy project! At least to daydream about.

And Cutter is right, too, in noting that Roethke's reputation hasn't fared as well as some; I'm not sure just what his readership is among younger poets just now, whereas you can be sure that references to any number of other poets active in the Fifties will be recognized. I wonder if it's that our era values the self-examination of Bishop and Lowell over what I'd call Roethkean enactment. "The Waking," for instance, like many of Roethke's best poems, is a dance, and it give us the feel of a body swaying in trance, enchanted by its own vision, giving voice to a state of mind that resists the analytical light of the intellect. Do we feel better about experience considered and mediated in poetry than we do about the kind of weird psychic drama of Roethke's slippery roots and strange little songs about rats and the underlife?

Certainly the poem that Robert has chosen this week is one that has far more kinship to Roethke, Berryman and Plath than to the work that Bishop, Lowell or Kunitz were doing at about the same time.