Question

In his poem "Cuttings (later)," Theodore Roethke writes, "I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, / In my veins, in my bones I feel it,--" (lines 5-6). In a pair of poems--"Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later),"--that largely describe the behavior of plants, this moment stands out as one in which we see a comparison made between plants and the speaker of the poem. What do you think the speaker means here, saying he "feels" "that sucking and sobbing"? Explain, in light of the rest of the two poems.

Answer 1

Answer: The speaker means that he relates to a spiritual level with the plants, feeling identified with how chopped the plants are, and how he had to "suck and sob" to grow from the struggle.

Explanation: Roethke wrote these two poems with a sense of unity towards the life of the plants. In both of them, he implies that relating to how destroyed and wounded the plants feel for being chopped, takes him to a spiritual level where he finds some growth. In the lines; "I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, / In my veins, in my bones, I feel it,--" from "Cuttings (later)", the author says that he "feels" that "sucking and sobbing", meaning that he had to suffer like plants, to grow from the pain.