Cella is also the root also for " cell," "the unit of life and growth." This frame structure makes an "etymological pun" on the word cellar, deriving from the Latin cella, broadly meaning "room," thus mirroring the setting of the poem in its construction as a poem of containment. The "parallel clauses" of the first and tenth lines, both beginning "Nothing would," create a frame for the poem.
#CELLAR MEANING FREE#
Roethke leverages the free verse form to achieve an extreme "manipulation of vowel and consonant" sounds.
Strong stresses and spondees, emphasized by consistent alliteration and slant rhymes, evince the same action and vitality in language that the speaker of the poem perceives in the vegetation of the cellar. The olfactory imagery of the cellar's rankness, presented largely in a litany following the sixth line, blends with the tactile nature of the "slippery planks" in the ninth line. The verse abounds with dynamic visual imagery of the roots, bulbs, and stems practically growing before the eyes of the speaker. The poem highlights the "dank" humidity of its setting and engages with a range of the reader's senses. In eleven lines of free verse, "Root Cellar" consists almost in its entirety of images of the root cellar. Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.Įven the dirt kept breathing a small breath. Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,īulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Generally, discourse and anthologies use the later The Lost Son title, "Root Cellar". "Root Cellar" saw publication before The Lost Son, in the November 1943 issue of Poetry, under the title "Florist's Root Cellar". Roethke vividly portrays the root cellar in "a violent inferno of creation". Within a greenhouse, the root cellar functions to keep roots alive, allowing them to grow in this underground structure. Roethke's father died when Roethke was fourteen, the same year his uncle committed suicide, a circumstance which looms behind Roethke's conception of the greenhouse. Roethke, in his letters, described the greenhouse as his "symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth".
Roethke grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father, Otto, owned a 25-acre greenhouse.
#CELLAR MEANING SERIES#
The poem belongs among Roethke's series of " Greenhouse Poems" the first section of The Lost Son, a sequence hailed as "one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry" and marked as the point of Roethke's metamorphosis from a minor poet into one of "the first importance", into the poet James Dickey would regard among the greatest of any in American history. " Root Cellar" is a poem written by the American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) published in Roethke's second collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems, in 1948 in Garden City, New York.
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