|
©
g. Paul Bishop 1957
ROBERT LOWELL
Robert (Traill Spence) Lowell, Jr.
Poet 1917-1977 -----
Selected Poems
from
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by
Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair
-----
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucker1
(FOR WARREN
WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of
the sea and the fouls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and
every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.2
I A
brackish reach of schoal off Madaket,---3
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble
feet,
5
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights4
10
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.5 We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,6
Where the heel-headed dogfish7 barks its nose
On Ahab's void and forehead,8 and the
name
15
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea
Where dreadnaughts9 shall confess
Its hell-bent deity,
When you are
powerless
20
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back.10 The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and the
repeat
25
The hoarse salute.
II
Whenever
winds are moving and their breath
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at you death
In these home waters. Sailor, can you
hear
30
The Pequod's11 sea wings, beating landward, fall
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall
Off 'Sconset,12 where the yawing S-boats splash
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,13
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet14
clears
35
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers15 lash
The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids
For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids
Seaward. The winds' wings beat upon the stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws
rush
40
At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast16
Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.
III
All you
recovered from Poseidon17
died
45
With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine
Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god.
Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,
Nantucket's18 westward haven. To Cape Cod
Guns, cradled on the
tide,
50
Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock
Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand
Lashing earth's scaffold, rock
Our warships in the hand
Of the great God, where time's contrition
blues
55
Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost
In the mad scramble of their lives. They died
When time was open-eyed,
Wooden and childish; only bones abide
There, in the nowhere, where their boats were
tossed 60
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news
Of IS,19 the whited monster. What it cost
Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale's slick
I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:
"If God himself had not been on our
side,
65
If God himself had not been on our side,
When the Atlantic rose against us, why,
Then it had swallowed us up quick."20
IV
This is the
end of the whaleroad21 and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed
swell
70
And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools
To send the Pequod packing off to hell:
This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,
Snatching at straws to sail
Seaward and seaward on the turntail
whale,
75
Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,
Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:
Clamavimus,22 O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail
For water, for the deep where the high tide
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and
ebbs.
80
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,
The beach increasing, its enormous snout
Sucking the ocean's side.
This is the end of running on the
waves;
85
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans23
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
V
When the
whale's viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this
world
90
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole24
And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat25
The bones cry for the blood of the white
whale,
95
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into
rags,
100
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven26 timbers
Where the morning stars sing out together27
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers
The red flag hammered in the mast-head.28
Hide,
105
Our steel, Jonas Messias, 29 in Thy side.
VI
Our Lady of Walsingham30
There
once the penitents took off their shoes
And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English
lane,
110
Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God. Sailor, you were
glad
115
And whistled Sion31 by that stream. But see: Our
Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There's no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids. As
before
120
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at
Bethlehem
125
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.
VII
The empty
winds are creaking and the oak
Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,32
The boughs are trembling and a gaff33
Bobs on the untimely
stroke
130
Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell34
In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It's well;
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,
Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish;
Unmarried and corroding, spare of
flesh
135
Mart once of supercilious, wing'd clippers,
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea's
slime
140
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
1946
1. An
island south of the Massachusetts coast, famous as the home port for
whaling ships in the nineteenth century. Many of these were owned and
manned by Quakers. Warren Winslow, a cousin of Lowell, died at sea when
his naval vessel went down.
2. The epigraph is
slightly paraphrased from Genesis 1:26.
3. A place on the
west of Nantucket Island.
4. Metal covers that
close over portholes and ventilators to keep out light and water.
5. The imagery of
these lines is largely borrowed from Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod
(Boston, 1898, pp. 5-6), as Hugh B. Staples has pointed out:
"The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland,
laden with emigrants, was wrecked on Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday
morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks. . . . I
saw many marble feet and matted heads as the clothes were raised, and
one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl . . . ; the
coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by rocks or fishes, so that the
bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, ---merely red and
white, --- with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights;
or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand . .
."
6. The origin of
life.
7. A small shark.
8. Ahab is the
monomaniacal hunter of the white whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
This phrase, used for "heart and head," implies the emptiness
of Ahab's heart and the strength of his will.
9. Battleships.
10. Orpheus went to
Hades and by his music persuaded Persephone to let his wife, Eurydice,
return to earth.
11. Ahab's ship,
which the whale Moby Dick destroyed.
12. Siasconset, on
eastern Nantucket. S-boats are large racing sailboats once popular in
New England.
13. Large,
parachute-like racing sails designed to catch the wind.
14. The rope by
which a sailboat's main sails is angled to the wind. Clear the
blocks: is disentangled from the pulleys through which it runs.
15. Landlubbers.
16. Moby Dick.
17. Greek god of the
sea.
18. From this
island, off the coast of Massachusetts, the whalers put to sea. Many of
them were Quakers.
19. Moby Dick, here
identified with God, who told Moses, "I AM THAT I AM" and
instructed him to say to the Israelites, "I AM hath sent me to
you." (Exodus 3:14) "Whited monster" is adapted
from "whited sepulchre" (Matthew 23:27).
20. Alive.
21. An Old English
Kenning (or epithet) for the sea.
22. "We have
cried" (Lat). Compare Psalms 130:1---"Out of the depths
have I cried unto thee, O Lord."
23. Leviathan is a
great water animal, mentioned in the Old Testament, here identified with
the whale.
24.
The closest point on the mainland of Massachusetts to Martha's Vineyard,
an island near Nantucket.
25. "The valley
of judgment. The world, according to some prophets and scientists, will
end in fire" (Lowell, writing to Kimon Frair and John Malcolm
Brinnin). Compare: "Let the hearten we wakened, and come unto the
valley of Jehosophat; for there will I sit to judge all the heathen
round about." (Joel 3:12).
26. Broken inwards.
27. From Job
38:7, "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy."
28. At the end of Moby
Dick, as the Pequod us sinking, the Indian Tashtego's arm rises from
the water to nail Ahab's flag to the sinking mast. A sky-hawk is caught
between hammer and flag, and Melville says that the "bird of
heaven" is dragged down with the satanic ship.
29. Jonah (in the
New Testament, Jonas) is identified with the Messiah or Christ because
Lowell imagines the whaler's harpoon penetrating the whale, and Jonah
within it, just as the centurion's spear pierced the side of Christ, and
also because Jonah, like Christ, emerged after a three-day
"Burial."
30. Adapted, Lowell
has said, from E. I. Watkins, Catholic Art and Culture, London.
1947, p. 177: "For centuries the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham
has been an historical memory. Now once again pilgrims visit her image
erected in a mediaeval chapel, where, it is said, they took off their
shoes to walk barefoot the remaining mile to the shrine. . . . The road
to the chapel is a quiet country lane shaded with trees, and lined on
one side by a hedgerow, On the other, a stream flows beneath the trees,
the water symbol of the Holy Spirit, 'the waters of Shiloah that go
softly,' the 'flow of the river making glad the city of God.' Within the
chapel, an attractive example of Decorated architecture, near an altar
of mediaeval fashion, is seated Our Lady's image. It is too small for
its canopy, and is not superficially beautiful. 'Non est species neque
decor,' there is no comeliness or charm in that expressionless face with
heavy eyelids. But let us look carefully. . . . We become aware of an
inner beauty more impressive than outward grace. That expressionless
countenance expresses what is beyond expression. . . . Mary is beyond
joy and sorrow. . . . No longer the Mother of Sorrows nor yet of the
human joy of the crib, she understands the secret counsel of God to
whose accomplishment Calvary and Bethlehem alike ministered."
31. Or Zoin. Compare
Isaiah 51:11: "Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall
return, and come with singing unto Zoin."
32. A tomb for a
person whose body is not buried there.
33. A wooden spar,
part of the rigging of a sailboat.
34. A bell buoy
marking shallow waters. __________
"To
Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
"It is the future generation that
presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible
soap bubbles of ours."
SCHOPENHAUER35
"The hot night makes us keep our
bedroom window open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's
edge.
5
This screwball might kill his wife then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust---
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep
alive.
10
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric35a of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
1959
35. Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860), pessimistic German philosopher.
35a. Also called the
male menopause. __________
Skunk
Hour36 (FOR
ELIZABETH BISHOP)
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our
village;
5
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up
all
10
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall. The season's ill---
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean38
15 And
now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for
fall;
20
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he's rather marry. One dark night,40
25
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not
right
30 A car radio bleats.
"Love, O careless Love. . . ."41 I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell,42
35
nobody's here--- only skunks, that
search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red
fire
40
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on
top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air---
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage
pail. 45
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.43
1959
36. The
scene is Castine, Maine, where Lowell had a summer house. As he has
written, "The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or
less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean
inland. Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of
tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect." The
Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, ed. Anthony Ostroff, p. 107.
37. "The dedication is to Elizabeth
Bishop, because re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the
shell of my old manner. . . . 'Skunk Hour' is modeled on Miss Bishop's
'The Armadillo' [p.309]. . . . Both . . . use short line stanzas, start
with drifting description and end with a single animal" (Losell's
note).
38. A Maine mail order
house that deals in sporting goods, including clothes for the outdoors.
38a. Nine nautical
miles an hour (about 10mph) is fast for a sailboat, and indicates that the
millionaire's two-masted yacht was fairly large--about 40 feet long.
39. "Meant to
describe the rusty reddish color of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain
near where we were living" (Lowell's note.)
40. A reference,
Lowell says, to The Dark Night of the Soul of St. John of the
Cross.
41. A popular song of
the time, entitled "Careless Love," which contains the two
lines: "Now you see what careless love will do. . . / Make you kill
yourself and your sweetheart too."
42. An adaptation of
Lucifer's line, "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell," in Paradise
Lost, IV:75.
43. "The
skunks," says Lowell, "are both quixotic and barbarously absurd,
hence the tone of amusement and defiance." Their
"affirmation" is therefore "ambiguous." __________ For
the Union Dead44 "Relinquunt
Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."45
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;
5
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating
kingdom
10
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
15
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,
20 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,
25
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James46 could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their
monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's
throat.
30
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle. He has an angry
wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at
pleasure,
35
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.
40 On a thousand small town New England
greens,
the old white churches hl=old their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.47 The
stone statues of the abstract Union
Soldier
45
grow slimmer and younger each year---
wasp-wasted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's
father wanted no monument
except the
ditch,
50
where his son's body was thrown48
and lost with his "niggers." The
ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war49 here;
on Boylston Street,50 a commercial
photograph
55
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-children51 rise like
balloons.
60 Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for blesséd break. The Aquarium is
gone.
Everywhere,
65
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
1959
44. The
poem was first published with the title, "Colonel Shaw and the
Massachusetts 54th." The monument it describes is a bronze relief by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) depicting Robert Gould Shaw
(1837-1863), commander of the first Negro regiment organized in a free
state, who was killed in the assault his troops led against Fort Wagner,
South Carolina. The relief, dedicated in 1897, stands on Boston Common
opposite the Massachusetts State House.
45. "They give up
everything to serve the Republic" (Lat).
46. (1842-1910),
American philosopher and psychologist, who taught at Harvard.
47. The Union forces
in the Civil War.
48. By the Confederate
soldiers at Fort Wagner.
49. That is, the
Second World War.
50. A street in
downtown Boston.
51. Such as those who
were conducted to the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, by Federal
troops in 1957, enforcing the Supreme Court's demand for integrated
schools. __________
Ezra
Pound
Horizontal in a deckchair on the bleak ward.52
some feeble-minded felon in pajamas, clawing
a Social Credi33 broadside from your table, you saying.
". . . here with a black suit and black briefcase; in the briefcase,
an abomination, Possum's54 homage to
Milton."
5
Then sprung; Rapallo,55 and then the decade gone;
then three years, then Eliot dead, you saying,
"and who is left to understand my jokes?
My old Brother in the arts . . . and besides, he was a smash of a
poet."
He showed us his blotched, bent hands, saying,
"Worms.
10
When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome
wireless,56 she knows it was shit, and still loved me."
And I, "Who else has been in Purgatory?"
And he, "To begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet."
1969
52. Lowell
visited Pound when the latter was in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the
criminally insane, in Washington.
53. A dubious economic
program which Pound fanatically supported.
54. Eliot, who
originally denounced Milton, as Pound did, and then later recanted.
55. Released from the
hospital, Pound went back to Rapallo, Italy, to live.
56. Pound talked
several times on the Italian radio during the Second World War.
"She" is Olga Rudge, Pound's companion. __________
Robert Frost
Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,
his voice musical. raw and raw---he writes in the flyleaf:
"Robert Lowell from Robert Frost, his friend in the art."
"Sometimes I feel too full of myself," I
say.
5
And he, misunderstanding, "When I am low,
I stray away. My son57 wasn't your kind. The night
we told him Merrill Moore58 would come to treat him,
he said, 'I'll kill him first.' One of my daughters thought things,
knew every male she met was out to make
her;
10
the way she dresses, she couldn't make a whorehouse."
And I, "sometimes I'm so happy I can't stand myself."
And he, "When I am too full of joy, I think
how little good my health did anyone near me."
1969
57. Frost's
son committed suicide.
58. A poet and
psychoanalyst. __________ Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 340-349. ----- --- All material is copyright protected ---
[Return
to R. Lowell Page]
|
