SOURCE: "Theodore Roelhke," in The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 159-90.

In the following essay, Vernon explores Roethke's affinity for garden imagery and the symbolism of sexual development, personal growth, and self-consciousness.

In Marvell's "The Garden" mere is a well-known passage that recalls one of the points Eluard's poem "You Are Everywhere" makes:

    The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
    Does straight its own resemblance find;
    Yet it creates, transcending these,
    Far other World, and other Seas;
    Annihilating all that's made
    To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Marvell begins by citing the classical doctrine of perception, which says that sense images of external objects are accompanied by images in consciousness and that the latter resemble the former as mirror images resemble real things. But then, as Eluard did with the line "you are its resemblance," Marvell...