Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze (1958). Content and Description

This is another poem from The Lost Son and Other Poems; it concerns three elderly women who used to work at the Roethke greenhouse. Like “Elegy,” this poem is a fond remembrance of people who meant a great deal to the speaker, but it is also a celebration of work. These “three ancient ladies” (l. 1) were responsible for tying drooping plants upright and generally for the well-being of “carnations” and “red chrysanthemums” (ll. 8, 9), among other plants.

Roethke remembers them as active and vital to the operations of the greenhouse despite their age; verbs and adjectives he uses to describe their actions are sprinkled, shook, flew, and twinkling, among others. Roethke’s choice of these active words demonstrates the life inherent even in the aged women whose responsibility it is to keep “creation at ease.”

The poem, though, goes even further: In its latter half, the three “fraus” are presented to us as not merely energetic, conscientious employees but as almost supernatural guardians of a world perhaps even beyond the greenhouse. The speaker notes that the women “flew along rows” “like witches” (l. 19) and that they “sewed up the air with a stem” (l. 22) and even “trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves” (l. 25).

These women are thus not merely women but almost sacred guardians of nature. This idea is borne out in the fact that they can sew up the air and trellis the Sun, two abilities that are traditionally considered to be beyond human control. By presenting them to us as personages who have almost supernatural abilities, Roethke sets up the reader for the final moving image, for these women, powerful and perhaps supernatural as they are, still inhabit a place in the speaker’s memory and thus retain their power even though they are deceased.

The speaker in fact claims that when he is “alone and cold in [his] bed” (l. 30) they “hover over [him]” (l. 31), as if they are indeed spirits. The poem concludes as the speaker tells us that “their snuff-laden breath [blows] lightly over me in my first sleep” (l. 35). The speaker’s remembrance of these women, therefore, is a testament to the enduring nature of the women and hence their work. The speaker recalls not only the physical work they did in and around the greenhouse but the women themselves, thus linking the importance of physical labor, especially labor spent in cultivating plants, with the enduring nature of both memory and the human spirit.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Determine the speaker’s view of labor by reading the poem carefully, then compare it to your own. What argument does the poem make about the value of work, and how does your own view of work compare with the speaker’s?

2. Why, if this is a fond remembrance of the speaker, does he describe the fraus as “witches” and “leathery crones”? What are the different connotations of the word crone?

3. What role does memory play in the poem? Compare the speaker’s memories with a fond memory of your own. What function does memory play in our lives?