Okay, here’s the rest of Roethke’s The Far Field. I’m going to mess it up with my comments, but you’ll find it nice and neat here.

Scroll down to the previous post for part one of Snow Poems.

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II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,

[We’re done with the dream in section one. Now the poet recollects his rural youth, and the way encounters with dead animals taught him not about death, but about the eternal. This seems paradoxical.]

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.

[Marvelous detail, marvelous assonance (learned/eternal; among/rubble.]

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:

[A child of visceral responses, the poet mourned the deaths of the animals he saw; yet the spectacle of the natural world coming back to vibrant life in the spring made him euphoric. He easily forgot the scenes he’s described of death and rot.]

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.

[Ever-renewed natural life is a form of eternity; it asserts itself endlessly against the pressure of all that death.]

– Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,

[The poet turns his memories this way and that. Now he thinks of lying once on a sandy riverbank considering a shell.]

Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

[What was I in a previous life? A previous incarnation? Maybe an inanimate object, or maybe a person, but one not so strange as I.]

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.

[Previous lives; and also afterlives. This is the eternity about which nature has taught the poet.]

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.

[The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s white light is the snowy pall from the dream in section one. We’re back in the car, I think… And not just not fearing infinity, but, as the dream suggests, being drawn again and again toward it, toward the far field at the end of the peninsula, and then toward the oncoming water after the peninsula.]

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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;

[From the description of a recurrent dream, to a set of memories of the natural world, to the present. Section three is set now, with the mature poet describing a strange temporal/spiritual experience he’s undergoing. The experience in a sense mirrors the experience of his dream: Both experiences have a dual nature: They are both physical narrowings – the world converging in on itself, things getting smaller and darker – and temporal advancements, quickenings, implying the impending end of the poet’s life.]

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, —

[Again, an experience akin to the convergence of different waterways as they meet and plummet to the plain, becalmed.]

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;

[I too, in my many-streamed complexity, have arrived at a becalmed place, outside the rush of daily reality.]

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

[Earlier, the poet wrote I watched and watched til my eyes blurred. He was talking about birds; now he stares at another manifestation of bejeweled nature: iridescent sandgrains. In the perpetual glory of nature the rapt poet finds his religion.]

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.

[The dead animals renewed him, made him not fear infinity; and he repeats the idea here, with two beautiful images of near-death: the September garden and the faint red ash of a weak fire. A lover of the earth, the poet finds transcendent bliss near at hand.]

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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.

[Again he revisits the initial death-dream. Dying, what used to be you drives toward the sea, toward the infinite. Your robes are green – the dress of nature – as you return to nature, converge with it, narrow into it.]

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.

[Death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thoughts of death – and allied thoughts of the oddness of our having been born at all – empty the comforting phenomenal world and make us naked – without psychological defenses.]

His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

[In death your spirit converges with nature.]

All finite things reveal infinitude:

[In those dead animals the child saw the immensity, saw the infinite life of the earth.]

The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

[The September garden, the faint red in the ash; and now the after-light — the after-life — created after the pines have been coffined in ice; and a certain shade paradoxically, at singular moments, bright; and also the pale snow vividly blue… The poem brims with images of unexpected, supplemental vivacity, with evidence of a sort of permanent imprint made on the world by virtue of each particular person having been here. The rest of the poem will list this poet’s particularities, his memories, his imprints.]

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.

[The tree is sunken; the self has died. But the tree’s sunkenness creates the silence of the water above it, lends the water the mysterious beauty of its placidity. One man’s consciousness, having lived, having gathered memories, survives him, ripples out from his singular mind to all the waters of the world. Frozen his body may be, in the car that drove to the end of earthly life; but his spirit continues into the water beyond the land, part of ever-regenerating nature.]