THE FLIGHT. It is, in Roethke's words, "a terrified running away - with alternate periods of hallucinatory waiting . . . ; the protagonist . . . is hunting like a primitive, for some animistic suggestion, some clue to existence from the sub-human." Fishing in "an old wound," the repository of mental scars, the protagonist probes not only the private unconscious, but the "sub-human" of the collective unconscious as well. Roethke does not tell us the cause of this regressive flight, but the poem itself suggests a reason: the crying of the dead at Woodlawn. The father's ghost again threatens the lost son; and the end of this section of the poem suggests that it is specifically the boys masculinity that is being threatened.