In Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconsciousness, there is an anxiety in the present that constantly struggles with the past in trying to make sense out of one’s present being. Very often, this type of anxiety presents itself as the child archetype, which again takes the form of “a third thing of an irrational nature.” For one thing, it often takes shelter in the nature and is “nourished or protected by animals” (Jung 168). For another, the child motif would appear as “the adversities of early childhood-abandonment and danger through persecution” (166). The third aspect is that the child archetype could spring out as the miraculous “smaller than small and yet bigger than big” transformation. This study aims to explore the child archetype in its various forms of metaphases in Roethke’s poetry for it constitutes much of Roethke’s creative strength as a poet.
