Advance and Retreat: Motion in Roethke's "North American Sequence"
Graduation Date
Summer 1972
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
Roethke's imagery provides the key to his purposes in these poems. Through an analysis of the imagery of movements which advance and retreat in "North American Sequence” I think the thematic and structural development of the poems will become apparent. Since the poems in the second and third sequences of The Far Field receive their thrust from the focus of the opening sequence unraveling "North American Sequence" should reveal more than the meaning of the six poems comprising it.
Before working with the motion imagery of "North American Sequence," I shall first examine the structural patterns in the six poems; in doing so, I shall emphasize advancing and retreating motion as one of the structural bases of the poems. Turning to the imagery, I intend to examine the images which imply an advancing and retreating motion, as well as to correlate the patterns of the imagery with the patterns in the structure of the sequence.