I Am! Says the Lamb by Theodore Roethke

First published: 1961; illustrated

Subjects: Animals and nature

Type of work: Poetry

Recommended Ages: 10-18

Form and Content

The twenty-two poems in the first section of I Am! Says the Lamb, entitled “The Nonsense Poems,” address younger children in ways that appeal to minds free of conventional restrictions, filled with wonder, and charmed by the play of sounds, rhythms, and meanings. They are accompanied by drawings as playful as the verses in their depiction of the poet’s subjects, such as a Kitty-Cat Bird and Myrtle the Turtle. Through these characters, the adult world is explored, transformed by nonsense and the magic of language into objects of delight for children.

Theodore Roethke applies the principle that in foolishness, there is an element of divinity, in topsy-turvy an element of truth—or, as Emily Dickinson put it, “Much madness is divinest sense/ To a discerning eye.” The poems assume that the young reader (or, better, listener) possesses the discernment necessary to see that the adult world makes sense often, perhaps only, when it is viewed madly. The adult, unless a poet, forgets that a simple chair is animated by a power that enables it to disappear. Its existence is proven (or discovered) empirically: “To know a Chair is really it,/ You sometimes have to go and sit.” Adults impose order and meaning on the world, see it as “out there,” whereas the poems in this first part of the book posit the notion that children see in a continuum, assuming that other creatures and things are mere extensions of themselves, their feelings and their view of the world. The poems capture the obverse of this view as well, see the world “out there” filled with mysterious forms that cannot be understood. “The Gnu,” for example, sums up this dilemma deftly in a couplet: “There’s this to Remember about the Gnu:/ He closely Resembles—but I can’t tell you!” To the child, the world sometimes both denies and threatens.

In the section “The Greenhouse Poems,” twenty poems address a more mature audience with more mature themes and subjects. The greenhouse of the title symbolizes the artificial version of nature as creative force. It houses and harnesses this creative force and is not only fed by the sun but also illuminated by it. The mood of these later poems is more somber, and the shift toward sobriety is reflected in the use of language and stanzaic patterns. The poems in the first section are on the whole short and heavily rhymed. The stanzaic patterns and line lengths in the poems of the second part are irregular, and rhyme disappears after the first five poems. The free verse of these poems suggests a throwing off of restraints and growth. Both the language and the illustrations reflect a shift toward serious subjects: dying, alienation, and suffering—the old florist stands “all night watering roses, his feet blue in rubber boots.” In these final poems, behavior is viewed in the moral terms of the adult. The youth in “Moss-Gathering,” for example, having gathered moss from the marsh, feels guilty. “I always felt mean,” he says: “As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;/ Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,/ By pulling off flesh from the living planet;/ As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.” In the illustration that accompanies this poem, the youth is shown trudging along a path that winds out of sight, followed by a bird. It is not clear whether the bird is the youth’s companion or pursuer, or whether the youth is disappearing into the woods or simply going home. Roethke offers two worlds—that of the child, illuminated by merry nonsense and innocence, and that of the older child, filled with beauty, mystery, and fecundity. At the dark edges of this adult world, however, some part of the reader, like the youth, suffers and disappears into mystery.

Critical Context

In the tradition of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, Theodore Roethke offers, in the nonsense of the rhymes, names, and subjects in the first set of poems, a world in which children can laugh and frolic. It is a world in which the imagination is given free reign to create helter-skelter levity by distorting the ordinary way in which children are taught by adults to view the world. Freed from the restraints of sober sense, bears talk and serpents sing. The rhythms are as bouncy as the nonsense that plays on the predicaments of children—their fears, feelings, and outlooks and their fascination with magic.

The poems for older children and adults have the air of magic about them, too, and the imagination plays among the dark places that adult children would find if they would go exploring in nature. An occasional moral marks the early poems and is mocked; in the later ones, more ominous strains are heard in the lines, and images reveal a side of nature that frightens the child and warns the adult. The forces of nature are exposed in images of the wind’s violent thrashing and the “ghostly mouths” of the “Orchids.” The weed puller, it is suggested, digs his own grave, “Hacking at black hairy roots” and finding “fern-shapes,/ Coiled green and thick.” Roethke’s adult world is not far from the demonic forces and grotesque forms of the fairy tale. Here, it is disguised as poems for adults.

Bibliography

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Bogen, Don. Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991.

Bowers, Neal. Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.

Kusch, Robert. My Toughest Mentor: Theodore Roethke and William Carlos Williams (1940-1948). Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999.

Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.

Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Stiffler, Randall. Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1986.

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