Root Cellar <Tab/>After reading the poem written by Theodore Roethke, entitled Root Cellar, I envisioned a dark, scary, ghost story. The poem was very understandable to read and on the surface it explains vegetables in a root cellar. The text has a literal meaning of that but the figurative language Roethke used in his poem painted a very different picture then a plan root cellar. I saw dead and living …showed first 75 words of 1169 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1169 total…on to describing "pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich" (8). Pulp is the soft and moist part of a vegetable or fruit but really I think he just using metaphoric terms to describe the ghosts. Their insides, like produce, could have a soft gooey consistency. Rank can be referring to the smell again or how the ghosts are growing profusely, like the definition of rank states, and/or how Roethke's fear of that root cellar is getting stronger.