Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) packed a huge amount into his sixty years: a rollercoaster of triumphs and disasters that informed his writing and pushed back the boundaries of what was deemed suitable subject matter for poetry. He was born into an old, prominent Bostonian family which gave Lowell a strong sense of personal and national history which he both took pride in and quarrelled with. He studied at Harvard before defecting to Kenyon College where he was influenced by the poets Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom and their emphasis on the importance of formal control in poetry. Kenyon was also a centre for the Southern Agrarian School of writers who posited the traditional values of the South as an antidote to modern technological capitalism, a critique that was also to echo in Lowell’s work. In 1940 Lowell extended his rejection of his Puritan heritage by converting to Catholicism. Though his belief did not last, it set the tenor for his first two books, in particular Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) which expresses Lowell’s confident faith in an authoritative manner remarkable for his age. Lowell’s exceptionally skilled handling of meter and rhyme, what the poet Tom Paulin has described as an “insistent greatness”, drew widespread praise and won him the Pulitzer Prize. This success came at the close of a difficult period in which Lowell’s stance as a conscientious objector during the Second World War had led to his imprisonment. The 1940s also saw the beginning and end of his first marriage to the novelist Jean Stafford. His personal life continued to be tumultuous with two further marriages, to Elizabeth Hardwick and the English author and society figure, Lady Caroline Blackwood, both of which also ended in divorce. Alongside his tangled emotional life, Lowell suffered severe psychological illness, most likely bi-polar disorder, which necessitated frequent hospitalisations, and which was only brought under limited control when he was prescribed lithium in the 1960s. This personal anguish and a crisis of faith directly informed the unflinching subject matter of his most famous book, Life Studies (1959) which was identified as founding the ‘Confessional Movement’ in poetry. Its influence in drawing on autobiographical material can be seen in the work of poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and still permeates poetic culture to this day. The collection also marked a radical formal shift, what Lowell termed “a breakthrough back into life”, towards a looser, less august style. By now a very public figure, Lowell continued to act unconventionally, joining a generation of younger poets such as Allen Ginsberg in protesting against the Vietnam War. Subsequent collections ranged from Imitations, his acclaimed versions of major European poets, and For Lizzie and Harriet, another intimate portrait of family life controversial for the use it makes of private letters from his second wife. A re-appraisal of Lowell’s entire oeuvre was prompted by the publication of his Collected Poems in 2003, with some critics seeing a tailing off in his powers in the years leading up to his death. Equally though, the appearance of this volume also emphasised his huge achievements and established him unarguably as “an audacious maker” (Frank Bidart).
Selected Poems by ROBERT LOWELL
AFTER THE SURPRISING CONVERSIONS
September twenty-second, Sir: today I answer. In the latter part of May, Hard on our Lord?s Ascension, it began To be more sensible. A gentleman Of more than common understanding, strict In morals, pious in behavior, kicked Against our goad. A man of some renown, An useful, honored person in the town, He came of melancholy parents; prone To secret spells, for years they kept alone? His uncle, I believe, was killed of it: Good people, but of too much or little wit. I preached one Sabbath on a text from Kings; He showed concernment for his soul. Some things In his experience were hopeful. He Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree And praise this countryside our Lord has made. Once when a poor man?s heifer died, he laid A shilling on the doorsill; though a thirst For loving shook him like a snake, he durst Not entertain much hope of his estate In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late Behind his attic window by a light That guttered on his Bible; through that night He meditated terror, and he seemed Beyond advice or reason, for he dreamed That he was called to trumpet Judgment Day To Concord. In the latter part of May He cut his throat. And though the coroner Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir Palsied our village. At Jehovah?s nod Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God Abandoned us to Satan, and he pressed Us hard, until we thought we could not rest Till we had done with life. Content was gone. All the good work was quashed. We were undone. The breath of God had carried out a planned And sensible withdrawal from this land; The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious nor devout, Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned At it in its familiar twang: ?My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!? September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.
HISTORY
History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends-- a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose-- O there's a terrifying innocence in my face drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.
MAN AND WIFE
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five day's white. All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad - its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye - and dragged me home alive. . . . Oh my Petite, clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve: you were in your twenties, and I, once hand on glass and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet - too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass, while the shrill verve of your invective scorched the traditional South. Now twelve years later, you turn your back. Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child, your old-fashioned tirade - loving, rapid, merciless - breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
MY LAST AFTERNOON WITH UNCLE DEVEREUX WINSLOW
1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather?s summer house I ?I won?t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!? That?s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father?s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. ... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound.... Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather?s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother?s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. One afternoon in 1922, I sat on the stone porch, looking through screens as black-grained as drifting coal. Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather?s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; stogie-brown beams; fools?-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, its legs, shellacked saplings. A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn fished with a broom straw in a basin hollowed out of a millstone. Like my Grandfather, the décor was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather?s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime. II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn display windows of Rogers Peet?s boys? store below the State House in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin?s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for ?Auction,? and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer? its naked Greek statues draped with purple like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear. IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... A fluff of the west wind puffing my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds: Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by ?the Island,? where my Uncle?s duck blind floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded. Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. As if posed for ?the engagement photograph,? he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga was accepting the arm of her ?protector,? the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, and coils of hair like rooster tails. The fines
THE DRUNKEN FISHERMAN
Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.
THE OLD FLAME
My old flame, my wife! Remember our lists of birds? One morning last summer, I drove by our house in Maine. It was still on top of its hill - Now a red ear of Indian maize was splashed on the door. Old Glory with thirteen stripes hung on a pole. The clapboard was old-red schoolhouse red. Inside, a new landlord, a new wife, a new broom! Atlantic seaboard antique shop pewter and plunder shone in each room. A new frontier! No running next door now to phone the sheriff for his taxi to Bath and the State Liquor Store! No one saw your ghostly imaginary lover stare through the window and tighten the scarf at his throat. Health to the new people, health to their flag, to their old restored house on the hill! Everything had been swept bare, furnished, garnished and aired. Everything's changed for the best - how quivering and fierce we were, there snowbound together, simmering like wasps in our tent of books! Poor ghost, old love, speak with your old voice of flaming insight that kept us awake all night. In one bed and apart, we heard the plow groaning up hill - a red light, then a blue, as it tossed off the snow to the side of the road.
SAILING HOME FROM RAPALLO
[February 1954] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks.... When I embarked from Italy with my Mother?s body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother traveled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleon?s at the Invalides.... While the passengers were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard?s soil was changing to stone? so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only ?unhistoric? soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother?s relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother?s coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
Harpo Marx
Harpo Marx, your hands white-feathered the harp—
the only words you ever spoke were sound.
The movie's not always the sick man of the arts,
yours touched the stars; Harpo, your motion picture
is still life unchanging, not nature dead.
I saw you first two years before you died,
a black-and-white fall, near Fifth in Central Park;
old blond hair too blonder, old eyes too young.
Movie trucks and five police trucks wheel to wheel
like covered wagons. The crowd as much or little.
I wish I had knelt… I age to your wincing smile,
like Dante's movie, the great glistening wheel of life—
the genius happy…a generic actor.July In Washington
The stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.
On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.
Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.
On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation—
prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.
The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.
We cannot name their names, or number their dates—
circle on circle, like rings on a tree—
but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,
distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us there,
that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies
we no longer control could drag us back.Water
It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,
and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,
and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.
Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.
The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.
One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.Dolphin
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.For The Union Dead
<i>Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.</i>
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic
The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his 'niggers.'
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages'
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.