robert-lowells-poetry robert lowell's poetry matthew hanson

8/12/2019 Robert-Lowells-Poetry Robert Lowell's Poetry Matthew Hanson

1/40

Robert Lowell's Poetry

By

Dr. Matthew Hanson


2/40

2

Robert Lowells Poetry

Poetry makes nothing happen Auden said. But for Robert

Lowell poems were actions, event[s]...not the record of an event.1

and did. In this essay, I mean to chart the form of a Lowell poem and

show you the things he does best. Let us begin.

It would be hard to make a list of Robert Lowells ten or twelve

best poems that would seem likely to any one too new to be true

Lowells best known poems are his best written. But here it is:

Dolphin, For the Union Dead, The Drinker, Skunk Hour,Where the Rainbow Ends, The Death of the Sheriff, Mr.

Edwards and the Spider, The Drunken Fisherman, At the Indian

Killers Grave, Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid, Colloquy in

Black Rock, Between the Porch and Altar, In Memory of Arthur

Winslow, and The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.

Each Lowell poem is a fragment of an immense canvas to

read just one is to look in the dark with a candle at a painting that

goes on for rooms. The canvas itself is one in which commonplace

collides with history,2 mythology, Christianity, and literature (to

Lowell, all are synchronous3), ruled over by the specters of Times

passage, Decay, and Death. Thoroughly a poet of New England, most

of Lowells poems happen in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New

York, or Maine. Lowells Charles River is an adumbration of the

1Seamus Heaney: The Government of the Tongue (New York, 1988): 129.2Lowells favorite historical authors were (Norths) Plutarch, Thucydides, Tacitus, Clarendon, and

Toynbee. (Poetry 81 [Jan. 1953]: 269.)3 Underlying this is the Augustinian idea that in Gods eyes all time is an eternal present. For further

illumination see Saint Augustines Confessions: Book XI, chapter 20.


3/40

3

Acheron; his Longfellow Bridge a parody of Gods covenant the

Rainbow;4 his Public Garden is the Garden of Eden. In Lowells

world, Christ, Adam and Eve, Captain Ahab, Col. Robert Gould

Shaw, William James, Nantuckets Quakers, and all of Lowells

Relatives might conceivably meet on Boston Common to watch

yellow dinosaur steam shovels or storm the gold dome of the State

House with arrows, spears, muskets, or bombs.

In the beginning there is the Old Lowell, the Primeval Lowell.

Of his first book (from which much of his second, and most famous

book, was later taken) Lowell said:

[It] was written during the war, which was a

very different time from the Thirties. Then

violence, heroism, things like that, seemed

much more natural to life. They seemed

everyday matters and that governed my style.

Things seemed desperate. Even though our

cities werent bombed you felt they might be,and we were destroying thousands of people.

The world seemed apocalyptic at that time,

and heroically so. I thought civilization was

going to break down....5

What should I call this stage? St. Augustine and Mellville? Auden and

Washington Irvings spend Christmas on Nantucket? It is his blood and

guts; bowels, gulls, and skulls stage. The landscape of the early

poems is theological, peppered with religious imagery,6and peopled

4See Genesis 9:12-17.5Observer21 July 1963: 22.6Lowell once said his early poems try to be poems and not a piece of artless religioustestimony...there is a question of whether my poems are religious or just use religious imagery. I


4/40

4

by two basic types of characters. First, the Majority: blind to sin, they

are ensnarled in a web of voluptuousness, fornication, drunkenness,

ostentation, gluttony, greed, boasting, vanity, and envy that is the by-

product (or purpose) of our culture. Their spiritual world, the nobler

side of mans being, has been sold off, banned triumphantly, or

rejected all together. These are Lowells Quakers, Bostons serpents,7

Sextus Propertius, The Fat Man in The Mirror. On the wet end of

the plank: the Minority, the Prophets, the outcasts, the Exiles. They

see the Kingdom of Heaven as present in the world-as-we-know-it;

for them, the covenant is active, exists; to them the world is racking,persistently sinful, and, whats worse they are generally powerless

to change it. They are helpless; yet an unshifting grip on a wisdom

that is their lonely own, to hope of salvation for both sinners and

themselves, makes them heroic. Their world is one where religion

and purity must give ground,/ little by little; but it does no good;

whose nuns are happy to pray/ for what lifes shrinkage leaves

from day to day. This is Mother Marie Threse and the speakers

in Where the Rainbow Ends and Colloquy in Black Rock. They

are tormented by the passage of Time which manifests itself in

Decay and Death8 in themselves and others in a way that the

Majority are not. In early books Land of Unlikness, Lord Wearys

Castle, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs Lowell is undiluted; here

havent any idea...what makes the earlier poems valuable seems to be some recording ofexperience. (Robert Lowell, The Collected Prose of Robert Lowell (New York, 1987), p. 250)7In Boston serpents whistle at the cold. (from Where the Rainbow Ends)8Often symbolically e.g., cancer is a crab in In Memory of Arthur Winslow; alcoholism awhiskey bottle full of worms in The Drunken Fisherman.


5/40

5

symbolism interested him more than science; the poems are

unbridled, lyric, and grotesque.

This Easter, Arthur Winslow, less than dead,

Your people set you up in Phillips House

To settle off your wrestling with the crab

The claws drop flesh upon your yachting blouse

Until longshoreman Charon come and stab

Through your adjusted bed

And crush the crab. On Boston Basin, shellsHit water by the Union Boat Club wharf:

You ponder why the coxes squeakings dwarf

The resurrexit dominusof all the bells.9

Stanzas are generally elaborate here lines two through five follow

an ABAB rhyme scheme, lines seven through ten ABBA, lines one

and six rhyme (the second stanza follows the same pattern; all end

rhymes are true rhymes) this poems entirety finds its beginnings

in the canzone, a repeating rhymed stanza which alternates

pentameter and six-syllable lines.10Regularly rhymed stanzas keep us

in the poem where it is impenetrable; they give our minds a

reassuring concrete base to think from and return to. The metrics

are deliberate and formal like Donne, or Milton; sentence length isvaried; each lines first letter is capitalized: the style is, in a word,

traditional. There is a good deal of obscurity; until the poems final

9From In Memory of Arthur Winslow.10With stanza length and rhyme scheme left to the poets discretion.


6/40

6

line (Where the wide waters and their voyager are one) the

emphasis is on, and the emotion is in, the details following

William Carlos Williamss no ideas but in things. Like the

paintings of William Harnett, the poems deliberately concentrate on

parts of the experience rather than the whole. If not intellectually

expressible, bewildering miasmas of imagery are emotionally clear;

the poems are packed with piercing human feeling: they go into our

souls like swords, or razors. The poet is not in the poem, like

Whitman, but removed entirely: a lack which creates muscular,

rugged, and potent verse. That is, when guided detail by detail by adetached speaker through an unmitigated experience, it becomes

more personally, and powerfully, our own. Our minds delight in

action; and in spatial correlations how one thing moves in relation

to another. Arthur Winslow is strengthened by kinesthesia (the

verbs: wrestling, drop (flesh), stab, crush, hit, dwarf); and its

connectives (in, upon, on, through, by) each detail is relative to at

least one other. In this stanza, for example, everything happens in

two sentences in two places Phillips House and Boston Basin:

Charon stabs Arthur Winslow inside of Phillips House, shells/ hit

water on Boston Basin; each sentence is connected to the other by

Arthur Winslow who hears (and ponders) the coxes squeakings. This

device compresses two times/places into a single event; its

unexpressed statements? the spinning world does not stop for death;

as one thing happens, so does another as you read this sentence

some one is born, dies, is married, or slits his wrists: this device is

Lowells mortar it gives his poems a laid-brick solidity. The device

works for the same reason rosesand lion alone are notvivid, but a rose


7/40


8/40

8

Fisherman.11I suggest reading the poem through to get its feel, then

re-read with footnotes to grapple with biblical contexts. Each of the

five stanzas is eight lines long.

Wallowing in this bloody sty,12

I cast for fish that pleased my eye13

(Truly Jehovahs bow14suspends

No pots of gold to weight its ends;15

Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout16

Rose to my bait.17They flopped aboutMy canvas creel until the moth

Corrupted its unstable cloth.18

11Jesuss words to Peter and Andrew: Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men (Mark

1:17). His words to Andrew do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men (Luke 5:10). Jesuss

parable: again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of

every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels and threwaway the bad. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the

righteous, and throw them into hell. (Matthew 13:47)12Gods acceptance of those who rebel and return is illustrated by the Prodigal son: So he went and joined

himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he began to be in want. And he would gladly have fed on

the pods that the swines ate; and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:15-16) Perhaps Isiah 66:17 Those

who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens following one in the midst, eating swines flesh

and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together. Or Do not give dogs what is holy; and do

not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and attack you. (Matthew 7:6) The

swine, because it parts the hoof and is cloven footed and does not chew the cud, is unclean to you.

(Leveticus 11:7)13See footnote 11.14People once thought the rainbow Gods weapon from which He shot arrows of lightning. God placed his

weapon in the heavens as a sign of His covenant. The covenant to which this line refers was made withNoah, his descendants, and every living creature. Covenant is a complicated word; here it means Gods

promise not to destroy the Earth again with floods. (From the Oxford Annotated Bible)15Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he

will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.16See footnotes 11 & 14. Fish are also symbols of fertility.17Matthew 18:27 Go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open

its mouth you will find a shekel....18Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old,

with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.


9/40

9

A calendar to tell the day;19

A handkerchief to wave away

The gnats;20a couch unstuffed with storm

Pouching a bottle in one arm;21

A whiskey bottle full of worms;

And bedroom slacks:22are these fit terms

To mete the worm whose molten rage

Boils in the belly of old age?23

Once fishing was a rabbits footO wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,24

Let suns stay in or suns step out:25

Life danced a jig on the sperm-whales spout26

The fishers fluent and obscene

Catches kept his conscience27clean.

19Matthew 6:34 Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let

the days own trouble be sufficient for the day.20Matthew 23:24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!21Why not both arms? Matthew 5:30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it

away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.22Isiah 62:10 I will greatly rejoice...for He has clothed me in the garments of salvation, has covered me

with the robe of righteousness.Bedroom slacks is ironic.23Isiah 66:24 And they shall go forth and look on the dead bodies of the men that have rebelled against

me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all

flesh. The imagery of fire and worms is derived from the rubbish dump at Gehenna....Gehenna is the

image of complete destruction, the extreme opposite of life. (Albert Nolan Jesus Before Christianity (NewYork, 1989): 89) Also see Matthew 10:28; Mark 9:43-48.24For behold, the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the stormwind, to render his anger in fury,

and his rebuke with flames of fire. (Isiah 66:15) Also, Matthew 24:12 And because wickedness is

multiplied, most mens love will grow cold.25See footnote 19.26Matthew 16:2-4 When it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the

morning, It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the

appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation

seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah.


10/40


11/40

11

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.35

First of all the poem is simply there, a melancholic, bitter,

drunken fishing day, with the broken, magical motion of someone

thinking out loud; but our thoughts about it, what we are made to

think about it, is there too: it is made to be there. The poem operates

on (at least) three levels: sexual, religious, and quotidian. The firstand third are the most important, what effect us immediately,

physically; the second is less immediate, and intellectual. A short

discussion will show how extraordinarily much the poem does mean;

this discussion is not particularly imaginative the reader should be

able to account for each assertion in the words of the poem. The

description is dense; generalizations, profound.

The poem is structured a bit like Brownings Soliloquy of the

Spanish Cloister; it content is near Donnes The Bait; and its mood

like Wallace Stevenss The Dwarf

Now it is September and the web is woven.

The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,

34When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he

finds none. (Matthew 12:43)35Matthew 14:22-32. Particularly verse 31: Jesus says O man of little faith, why did you doubt?


12/40

12

The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

For all the thoughts of summer that go with it

In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked

And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,

That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

Neither as a mask nor as garment but as being,

Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibble

And coffee dribble...Frost is in the stubble.36

But Lowells poem is at once flatter, harder, and more personal. One

can go over The Drunken Fisherman again and again and get lost

in it; with each re-reading, its meaning becomes clearer and more

brutal. The one voices metrics tremble between straight tetrameters,

(A grain of sand inside my shoe) and lines of densely clustered stresses

(I will catch Christ with a greased worm); waver between observation,

anger, and sleaze. Spatial correlations again weld the poem together:

the trout are in the brook, then in the creel; the worms are in the

36Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York, 1990): 152.


13/40

13

whiskey bottle; the bloody water in the holes. Never before has there

been such a powerful treatment of the theme of the isolation of man;

this is onefisherman alone one person but he represents us

all. The poem wrestles with, and finally accepts, the confusion, pain,

and wonder of mortal flesh; it recognizes mans most essential

limitation Mortality. Unlike Stevenss Dwarf, there is no

consolation of distance, or beauty. In the poem, Luck, Childhood,

weather, and youth are meaningless or have vanished; memory

(drools) and remorse (stinking) are sources of disgust; days are squares

on a calendar and not much more; self-pity (wallowing), rage, ashadow of hope, and the exaggerated trials the slightest of things

become (that is what agrain of sand inside my shoe.... (and following)

means) is all thats left over.

Aging is inevitable; it is a process that will not halt for sleep,

sickness or for a drunkard. People are rotted by alcohol, the poem

says, but they will not give it up. As we age, we choose between

despair and novelty; health and illness; bitterness and happiness;

living in the present, or where the raging memory drools/ Over the glory

of past pools: aging is commensurable with us it is as ineludible as

breathing and death is our only escape. And yet Lowell doesnt

say so its the configuration of this highly structured poem, its

inescapable framework, that says it. It would be hard to find

anything more unpleasant to say about aging than the fourth stanza;

anything as saddening as the second; or any line as horrible,

defeated, or flatly inescapable than this is the pot-hole of old age. But all

is said with leveled symbolic ease; with something harder than

despair, more bitter and grudging it is something out of a broken,


14/40

14

drooling, grit-toothed mouth or the mind of old mad King Lear. And

isnt there something heroic about our isolation? our anger (once

called the only thing we take with us to the grave)? our habits and

worries that let us while our lives away without realizing it (or

realizing it which is almost worse)? and that we all will die our

deaths alone? The tone of the last stanza, or rather its careful quaver

between hope and resignation, allows for this too. The unfinished

sentence And when the Prince of Darkness stalks/ My bloodstream to its

Stygian term...melodramatic at first glance, means what the repetition

of nothing will go again in Mary Winslow means. That in the end,nothing can, or will, bring back childhood or a life once it is

gone; what comes after is unknown, too horrible to discuss; and, at a

certain point, language fails. The rhetorical machinery (particularly

the second stanza, the first part of the fifth) makes us look closely at

ourselves; at the fear that plagues the hearts of all aging and elderly

that there is a grave, and not a pot of gold, at the end of the

Rainbow. The wit, depth, taste, and pathos in the face of our most

Essential Limitation is what makes The Drunken Fisherman so

good; its difficulty, its touching actual, and moral, wisdom makes it

one of the great poems of the language.

The New England life-view being Augustinian, Lowell

followed Pounds make it new and took it that everyone knew the

Bible to the point of wanting to see it, not in banal, but in fresh, terms.

References are personal37and drawing too much from them would be

like climbing down from a balloon without enough rope. Footnotes

37See my boldface; footnote 6.


15/40

15

in the poems text tell from where the lines where cribbed, should

unmuddy the waters of theologic import. Biblical references place the

poem in the tradition of English religious poetry; but here references

are used obliquely. Christ was a moral Fisherman, a fisher of men, a

messenger of God. Lowells fisherman is drunk, randy, and money

mad; he carries a whiskey bottle; he thinks to find spiritual

enlightenment through fornication (I will catch Christ with a greased

worm). The language of the poem is sexual. (I have a comment: many

of Lowells characters walk about with steam pouring out their ears:

Lowells poems have several Bessemer furnaces full of DylanThomas.) Lowells fisherman fishes not for all fish (men) but only for

those which please him: those which are attractive. The whale is a

spermwhale. This fisherman is a lecher: his catches (the context (they

are already caught) pushes this toward intercourse) are obscene(lewd,

morally repulsive), and fluent (flowing, liquid). Wet words in the

poem like drools,38 sperm, and grease make fluents import sexual.

Hookmeans a fishhook, certainly, but a hook is also anything curved

or sharply bent like bow, it probably means a penis. A peter is

slang for a penis; Shallow waters peter out suggests spiritual, and

physical, impotency. Truly Jehovahs bow suspends/ No pots of gold to

weight its ends means Lowells fisherman is not Gods servant, but

Mammons. His creel, his purse, his treasure in heaven39 is one

moths do destroy. He is anxious about tomorrow; worried about

38Lowells translation of Baudelaires To the Reader also uses drooling sexually:Like the poor lush

who cannot satisfy,/ we try to force our sex with counterfeits,/ die drooling on the deliquescent tits,/

mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry.(Robert Lowell, Imitations (New York, 1990): 46)39See footnote 18.


16/40

16

gnats;40he lives a sort of death, or hell, in life. His faith is no dormant

mustard seed,41but a lifeless grain of sand. He doesnt regret, his

compassion is gone; hes bad tempered; for him, old age is a pit. The

final line On water the Man-Fisher walks means what the final

lines of Where the Rainbow Ends and Colloquy in Black Rock

mean: in the end, even those who seem irredeemable have a chance

for salvation, liberation, and faith. The use of religious texts to pound

home sexual points makes the poem memorable, striking, and spicy.

Robert Frost once said its not what you say so much as how

you say it; and how this poem says what it does, how it is made, isnearly as interesting as what it says. Let me begin with a paragraph

or two on Lowells word choice a subject crucial to both late and

early work.

Words are plain, everyday words; items and actions he

describes are hard (often the hardest) and those of which human lives

consist. Lay readers can see, and feel, their way into at least one level

of each poem. Words confound, stretch, or hammer at the senses; we

are forced to feel and imagine staggering things. Verbs are active or

violent; nouns concrete, visual, musical; adjectives and possessives

set place like nouns, are temporal, expansive, active and few;

adverbs are sporadic to nonexistent. Verbs like suspends, rose, flopped,

corrupted, blow, danced, hauls, thrash, catch, and stalks are aural,

energetic: they make it simple and pleasurable to visualize action.

Verbs like wallowingand droolare strong because they come from our

regular description of something else a pig, and a child or invalid;

40See footnote 20.41See footnote 30.


17/40

17

in context, both parallels are powerful and important. Verbs are

repeated to expand multiple meanings. Cast, for instance, is used

three times: twice as to throw (I cast for fish that pleased my eye; Is there

no way to cast my hook) and once as to search (the Fishers sons must cast

about). Words meanings work back and forth, over and through each

other; in later readings, they deepen and interchange, widening the

poems scope.42

In all of his poems, Lowell had a predilection for adding

negative prefixes (mostly to verbs) to emphasize a poems negative

dramatic situation. Here it is used to stress the difficulty of aging.Couch unstuffed with storm is concise, vivid, engaging. The couch (a

metaphoric reference to the speaker?) is first stuffed; to qualify as a

couch unstuffed,our imaginations rework the image to fit the sense

we make of the words. The device engages us directly we are

forced to tear apart the couch ourselves.43 The device is quiet,

uncontrived, and (at times) perfect. It works (though to a lesser

degree) for the same reason that when I say dont think of a tiger

springing on you from the thicket you immediately think of just that

the mind must wrestle with what is negated.

Familiar nouns like pots, bait, creel, calendar, handkerchief, gnats,

bottle, slacks, belly, foot, and hook, appeal by virtue of being easily

recognizable, and visual. Nouns like trout; spout; water, pools, pot-hole,

42Other examples of this technique. In and burial ground above the burlap mill;/ I see you swing astring of yellow perch/ about your head and fan off the gnats that mill... (from The Mills of theKavanaughs) recognition of rime riche (here mill) is not instantaneous; but the quiet, uncontrived,witty repetition makes us reconsider words meanings and visually welds the elements of theexperience together. Lines like the fabulous or fancied patriarch/ who sowed so ill for hisdescent, beneath/ Kings Chapel in this underworldand dark create an illusion of depth byrepeating verbs that mean to go down, "under, or descend. (My boldface)43The bell-rope in Kings Chapel Tower unsnarls (from Mary Winslow) is another fine example we first imaginatively snarl then unsnarl the bell-rope.


18/40

18

water, and brook appeal for similar reasons; also, they are parts of

other nouns in the poem. A troutis a species offish; a spoutis part of a

whale; water, pools, pot-holes, and brooksare all part of, or flow into, a

river. Worm is especially vivid and moving through its repetition in

adjacent lines; its use as a symbol of sex and hell. Moon is both a

noun44and verb; it means our natural satellite, to while away time in

idle reverie, and a month: its multiple contexts, definitions, give us

different ways to read the poem; tie it to words like wallowing,

phrases like a calendar to tell the day.

Lowells possessives and adjectives expand, vivify, ortemporize.Jehovahs, for example, expands the six-foot archers noun

bow into a rainbow; whales enlarges rage from alarming into

something truly terrifying. Blood-mouthed,bloody, and oldare vivid in

themselves, and accrue additional visual and rhetorical force through

repetition. The strongest adjectives are nouns or verbs;45 a word

wrenched into a syntactic position for which it is not intended can

electrify, strengthen, and supercharge a passage. There are five in this

poem: canvas, whiskey, bedroom, dynamited, andgreased. Canvas creelis

vivid because first we imagine canvas itself as a ships sail, a bolt

of cloth then modify it into a creel; the effect is instantaneous,

purely seen and felt. Whiskey and bedroommake us ask questions like

is the fisherman an alcoholic? retired? an invalid? Dynamited

makes us ask...what sort of people fish with dynamite? in what sort

44As world is used in William Blakes Auguries of Innocence: to wit To see a World in a Grain of

Sand.45Though here I illustrate it with adjectives, verbs also make strong nouns. For example: like mussels to

the dark/ chopof the shallows.... (from The Mills of the Kavanaughs).


19/40

19

of world does he live?46Jesus fished with nets; this fisherman, or his

neighbor, is a bastard. Agreased wormis a rubber fishing bait rubbed

with Crisco; if wormdoes indeed mean penis here we should be

able to figure out why its is greased for ourselves.Verbs in the past

tense, used as adjectives, bury action or violence we feel the shock

of recognition and real experience with each. Verbs, nouns, and

adjectives are intentional, considerable, and appeal to one of the

senses; Lowells economical use of all three gives us poetry that is

weighty, vigorous, and conclusively well said.

There is a definite music to Lowells poetry. He made hissentences sounds, and made those sounds distinctive. Lowell thought

dramatically: it extends even to the point of phonetics. We need only

read wallowing in this bloody sty; a whiskey bottle full of worms; life

danced a jig on a sperm-whale's spout; and a handkerchief to wave away/

The gnats; from this poem, or things like the red flag hammered in the

mast head; when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net; or as the

entangled screeching mainsheet clears/ the blocks from The Quaker

Graveyard in Nantucket to see, and hear, this. Lines sounds are

definitive; when blent with syntax, colloquial diction, and the tired

(The Drunken Fisherman) or violent (The Quaker Graveyard....)

tone and interwoven with meaning, much to our surprise, or horror,

we are dropped (rather, shoved) into the middle of the experience

or event.47 The difference in the two poems tones rise from the

meanings of the words, but also, and I would argue more than in

46See text of footnote 5.47See text of footnote 1.


20/40

20

part, from the letters themselves.48In that quoted from The Drunken

Fisherman, notice the profusion of the consonants l, s, f, m, p, h, (t,

and w in conjunction with h) and n. These are soft, breathy

consonants we say in our mouths fronts, with our lips or just the

tongues tip. In that quoted from the Quaker Graveyard, notice

most consonants are hard, things we say with our full tongues, in our

throats backs, with small explosions of breath: r, d, t, b, k, s, hard c,

g, sh and ch. But let us look closely at one phrase from each poem.

Wallowing in this bloody sty builds tension and tone by using both

types. It begins with the mushy w, l, n, and th sounds, then givesthree hard and explosive b, d, and t. The first three words roll around

in our mouths backs; bloody releases the built energy with the

explosive bs and ds tongue touches on the palate; stys t caps it is

a word of contempt we say as if spitting. Though not as vivid as a

whiskey bottle full of worms(there are no pigs inthis sty), this is a line

used to a build tone, as many of Lowells first lines do. My favorite

line in all of Lowells poetry is the red flag hammered in the mast head.

Powerful in context,

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

Where the morning stars cry out together

And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers

The red flag hammered in the mast head. Hide

Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.

48This following is an admittedly rudimentary discussion. It may interest the reader to look at The Quaker

Graveyard In Nantuckets sixth section (Our Lady of Walsingham) to see how its softer tone (a stark

contrast to the rest) is created by using a greater percentage of low pitched vowels and softer consonants.


21/40

21

this line by itself is extraordinarily striking; notice how nearly all

hard consonants r, d, g, m, d, and t are clustered in it like bees

on a branch. The list itself grumbles. Hard consonants tend to gather

rhythmic stress; Lowell uses them to give heave to his beats

battering ram. Notice how all but in the and the latter half of

hammered is unstressed; red flag and mast headare fully stressed. Hard

consonants knot phrases together; here the beats hammer nails the

flag and mast head together. The hard dis repeated in red, head, and

hammered, m in hammered and mast, r in red and hammered.Consanguineous consonants weld the line together neatly, cleanly,

and without seam;49 and tie the nouns to verbs and vice versa: all

drag the reader into the sound, rhythm, and visual spectacle of a

sentence.

Only the blood mouthed rainbow trout/ rose to my bait, from The

Drunken Fisherman, illustrates Lowells witty, natural, and

ingenious assonance. Vowel sounds fit words lexical meanings. Here

they build from the back vowels o in only, blood-mouthed,

rainbow, trout, and rose to the slightly higher oo sound of to, to the

highest front vowel (ii) in my,and the final but slightly lower front

vowel a of bait. Rising tones support, further, and intensify the

image of a trout rising toward to the surface, taking the bait, and (I

would argue) ducking back under with the hook clamped in its

bloody mouth. The vowel arrangement gives us audial cues which

fill in blanks and complete the image. Back vowels often describe

49This is prevalent everywhere:e.g., sand sh tie together the words of the line the chapels sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold(from Where the Rainbow Ends).


22/40

22

weight pots of gold; or create a feeling of gloom this is the pot-hole

of old age. The back and low vowels a, ah, and oof both phrases are

said far back in the throat, echo in our mouth, throat, and chest; they

are sonorous, booming, and weighty (as opposed to the front vowel

ee, for example, which is said, and echoes, in the mouth only).

Lowells assonance is apparently effortless. Its overall effect is

symphonic dominant tones float freely, disappear and reappear at

intervals; assonance creates a verse that is at once lyrical, easy to read

(in spite of often eye-crossing meanings and syntax), and visual. It

makes Lowell better than most, and greater than multitudes of poets.Against stanzaic and discursive frameworks, a violence of

diction and syntax is brought to bear that gives the effect of a wrestle

to the death for the light of meaning: Lowells structures are efficient,

effective, and exacting. This establishes itself, on a small scale, in

sentence structure and punctuation. Here, both are seen easily in

stanza two. Punctuation is regular; and it is there for a reason. Semi-

colons in the first five-and-a-half lines suggest a close relationship

between what, at first, seem completely incongruous phrases; they

make us ask: what ties these together? The illogical list drives us to

read on to an answer. Semi-colons also make the statement briefer

and more forcible. Lowell makes heavy, and masterful, use of the

periodic sentence: a sentence that ends climactically with its most

important word. The colon after slackstells us what follows is closely

related to what has just been said; but with regular syntax, what

usually follows a colon is a list. Stanza two stands on its head;

nervous and neural energy decreases considerably when we switch

what is after, with what is before, the colon. In other words, let the


23/40

23

stanza read, from its beginning: Are these fit terms/ to mete the

worm whose molten rage/ boils in the belly of old age:/ a calendar to

tell the day; a handkerchief to wave away.... and so forth. Colons

usually tie two clauses together, the second clause amplifying the

first; enormous rhetorical, energizing, eccentric force is gained when

a list comes first. Our mind is hurled forward to meanings

completion; our attention is held in (and by) suspense until an

answer is given. The fifth stanza is forceful for this reason. Shaped

similarly, it makes us draw conclusions from the things themselves,

makes us feel, and see, our way into the symbols which we may ormay not accept; but if we accept even one, the damage is done, and

the concluding this is the pot-hole of old agetrembles like an arrow in

our hearts.

Comparing his couplets to those in Brownings The Last

Duchess, Lowell said of his early lines

[most are] run-on with...rhymes buried. Ive

always, when Ive used [the couplet], tried to

give the impression that I had as much

freedom in choosing the the rhyme as I had in

any of the other words. Yet they were almost

all true rhymes, and more than half the time

thered be a pause after the rhyme. I wanted

something as fluid as prose; you wouldnt

notice the form, yet looking back youd findthat great obstacles had been climbed.50

50The Collected Prose of Robert Lowell: 242


24/40

24

Lowell achieved this; yet most run on lines contain complete

thoughts, images, or actions; almost always have a verb and noun.

Between one lines end and the nexts beginning the just read line

expands: one thought piles itself atop of the previous. Take, for

example, the first two lines of The Drunken Fisherman: Wallowing

in this bloody sty/ I cast for fish that pleased my eye. The first line sets

action, relation (he is in, not out of, the sty) and place: the second line

a second action (cast) modifies or is commensurable with, the first

(wallowing); its noun (fish) qualifies the verb cast; it ends with a

qualifying phrase for fish (that pleased my eye). Both lines formcomplete thoughts and could stand unpropped. This is poetic

sedimentation; building a poem with lines as masons build walls

with bricks; the strength and completeness of each line is a vital part

of what makes Lowells poetry so strong, so vivid, so good

throughout.

What can make a poem, or break it utterly, is where a poet

begins his lines, and where he ends them. Words at lines ends have

the most time to expand (though only for a seconds fraction, this is

an important way in which poems affect us) in the eye and mind of

the reader. Lowell put nouns, sounds, and color-words at line ends to

strengthen, electrify, and stagger us; he often put verbs at ends of

lines to steal energy, make passive, or give a sense of apathy. When

color is put at a lines end (as with the corpse was bloodless, a botch of red

and whites/ its open staring eyes (from The Quaker Graveyard in

Nantucket)), in the tenth of a second it takes to jump from one lines

end to the nexts beginning, colors (here redandwhite) become vivid

and expand in our eye and mind. Verbs are different animals: the


25/40

25

tenth of a second has its effect, it lets action expand; Im not sure how

to explain it adequately, but the effect is, deflating, like watching a

balloon whicker out of gas. Metaphors throng to me: a fish or a

porcelain bowl can get bluer and bluer; but there are only so many

ways for the fish to swim, or the bowl to shatter. A verb at a lines

end effects us like verb repetition: and the imagination delights, not

repetitively, but only once, in action. The lines a handkerchief to wave

away/ the gnats; now the hot river ebbing hauls/ its bloody water into holes;

and raging memory drools/ over the glory of past pools illustrate this.

Wave away is relatively passive to begin with; but wave awaysposition makes us eager to go on to find out just what, exactly, is

being waved away. Verbs ending lines in Lowell are not fully

considered. In general this is because they lack a qualifying

connective noun the verbs exist in a vacuum, as it were. Hauls is

muscular, ss addition to its end makes it doubly powerful (notice,

when Lowell doesuse a verb at a lines end, that line almost always

enjambs with the next he steals some of the energy, but not all of

it); but again, we ask, hauls what? Droolsis an exception. It gains its

edge from its double slant rhyme with hauls, and holes. Placed at

the lines end, it is even more powerful: it expands itself into one long

disgusting string of slobber. If you doubt, consider how much more

force wave awayand haulswould have if, instead of ending lines, they

began them. It would, I think you will find, dramatically change their

tenor. Notice how strong the first cast; rose, corrupted, pouching, boils,

mimics, and stinking are. These verbs begin lines. Their strength both

visual and physical is also due to their use in conjunction with nouns.

Color swells in the mind and eye to a considerable degree when


26/40

26

placed at the end of a line: Lowell put nouns at lines ends for the

same reason. Verbs begin lines immediately following and force us to

mobilize the noun, as with the rainbow trout/ rose; molten rage/ boils; a

grain of sand inside my shoe/ mimics; remorse/ stinking; and so on. Strong

verbs at lines beginnings claw and hammer our senses: they make us

pay attention. In Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid; if you count, you

will find the proportion of verbs at lines beginnings is nearly two to

one over verbs in lines middles or at lines ends. These devices are

typical Lowell; they make his lines active -- vigorous, visual,

surprising -- and without doubt make his poems incredibly excitingto read.

Lowells most profound gift: he is able to sustain energy and

release it in a final line. On water the Man-Fisher walks. The syntax is

Latin: when we read it as the Man-Fisher walks on water it makes

more sense. Notice that the miracle here Jesus walking on water

is itself an action.And stalks my bloodstream to its Stygian term... the

line just before is the poems point of most extreme and hopeless

closure: until, and through, this line we are given the sustained

perplexity of a tortured human soul. The rhetorical quality, the use of

a classical reference (Stygian) in a poem primarily based on Biblical

passages, gives the sense of unresolved emotional, and spiritual,

confusion; which the ellipsis then dramatizes. The last line makes the

poem dialectic: unlike any other line, it is an antithesis, a paradox; it

creates a moment of revelation, a renewal of faith, a cleansing, a

release, a moment of ecstasy. Christs walking on water is a moment

of synthesis, of higher truth, and faith. The poem ties and unties a

spiritual Gordian knot; the final line cleaves it. The oblique message


27/40


28/40

28

or visually sharp. Words like baby, heart, fish, cows --ostensibly calm

words -- are used with words like hang, gutted, drool, sick, hammer,

hack, and worms. The overall effect of juxtaposition of terms such as

these is kinesthetic, at times sickening,52 but furthers the sense of a

struggling soul at war with itself. Arguably it is overdone, but then,

do we blame the vaulter for overshooting his pole? The reader may

want to compare these words with those that occur most frequently

in Lowells late poetry: in those books following (and including) the

publication of Life Studies in 1956. Many of the same words used in

early poems recur in the late: words like serpent, net, fish,drunkenness, moon, razor, cows, windows, search, and so on. This

list is by no means inclusive. There are other correlations: along with

certain words, Lowell dragged some early poems technical

tendencies into the late. The later style is more passive and adjectival.

Early poems happen mostly at night or at evening; later poems

continue this; but mornings and afternoons are more common.

Lowells birds are still birds of paradise; his rivers still the rivers of

life and imagination; his fish and sea creatures still women.53 In

later poems, Lowell no longer capitalizes each lines first letter: not

immediately felt, this does create a difference in authoritative degree

at lines beginnings it is the difference between stop and Stop.

In later poems, Lowell became a vivisectionist of self; unraveled a

tangled skein of people, places, and things inextricably tied together

by his personal experience. To my mind, the later poems can be

divided into two sections: the poems in Life Studies and everything

52C.f., ...watermelons gutted to the crust (from Colloquy in Black Rock).53Often ostensibly: see sonnet #4 of Mermaid.


29/40

29

that came after. The movement, in a general sense, is toward a more

personal and sublime style: one that moved away from Miltonic

literary poems with each line needing half a page of footnotes to

explicate, to one much simpler, much closer to actual thought and

speech. He makes us feel the late poems were as much a challenge to

his courage and feelings to write as they are a challenge to our

own to read. He no longer resorts to melodrama, or bombastic

rhetoric; but rather pummels us with blank, flat, sledgehammer

statement.54

The most brutal, horrible, and affecting poem in Life Studies iscalled Skunk Hour: it will serve as middle ground between a

discussion of Lowells early and fully matured style. Notice that,

though the literary allusions in the poem subsist, Lowell does reach

for (and gets) a rather elevated personalstyle. Instead of writing in

strict, fettering, metrical measures, the free verse lines are written in

sentences. The gentled discourse makes the poem more poignant; the

early poems are made things, like tapestries -- this poem is grounded

in personal experience. As do many of the poems in Life Studies, it

bears the unmistakable brand Ive been there. Still there is the

struggling movement of a spirit, looking for...something, but the

overtone is no longer frenzied; Skunk Hours tone is indifferent at

first, it later then explodes in our face.55Skunk Hour owes a great

deal of its action and construction, particularly the drifting

54See the corpse (Sailing Home From Rapollo); a line to itself, it makes us feel the inescapability, and

blank finality, of death.55Beginning with the line One dark night. (Stanza five)


30/40

30

description of the first four stanzas, to the poet to whom it is

dedicated, Elizabeth Bishop. Each of eight stanzas is six lines long.

Nautilus Islands hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her sons a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village;

shes in her dotage.

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victorias century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

The seasons ill

Weve lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox-stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnets filled with orange cork,


31/40

31

orange his cobblers bench and awl;

theres no money in his work,

hed rather marry.

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hills skull;

I watched for love cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town....

My minds not right.

A car radio bleats,

Love, O careless Love.... I hear

my ill spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat....

I myself am hell;

nobodys here

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up main street:

white stripes, moon-struck eyes red fire

under the chalk dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

of our back steps, and breathe the rich air


32/40

32

a mother skunk and her column of kittens swills the

garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

Landscapes in Life Studies remain theological; sheep, the hermit

heiress, fishnet, and hills skull illumine. Elaborate craftsmanship,

though muted, persists: each stanza has six lines; stanzas three, six,

and eight (ABCACB); four and five (ABCBCA) have identical rhymeschemes; twos and sevens first three lines follow identical schemes

(ABB) then diverge; the first stanzas first three lines follow the first

three lines of stanzas three, six, and eight (ABC), then it also diverges.

Free verse lines, slant rhyme, the interlocking yet unobtrusive rhyme

scheme, makes the verse varied, lyrical, and visually dense. Rhyme is

not willful, mannered, or rhetorical, but conventional -- and used to

drive home points. The poem has a ballads structure: each stanza

fleshes out one focal point, one dramatic (in this poem mostly

passive) action. The general movement is from general to specific

description to reflection, then back to specifics the skunks. The

understated ending is like that of a Greek tragedy. The first four,

seemingly throw-away, stanzas are winter, summer, fall, and,

obliquely (stanza two), spring near Nautilus Island; the second four

show characters (I and the skunks) in action. Stanza one and two

enclose the heiress, her actions, her family; the third the summer

millionaire; fourth the decorator; the fifth and sixth the I; the

seventh the skunks; the eighth stanza knots the I and the skunks


33/40

33

together. In the same way colors sharpen in our minds at lines ends,

stanza breaks here allow us to flesh out blocks of description: there is

only so much detail our minds can absorb at one time; stanza breaks

here are to give us time to pause, consider, mull over the details

catalogued in the stanzas, and what importance, if any, the details

have. This makes the poem alive in every line, touching, and

pleasurable to speak aloud or read. In the first four stanzas of drifting

description, no verbs begin lines; those that do are passive (is) or

have a qualifier before them (shes in; weve lost; decorator brightens;

hed rather; I watched; they marched; I stand; and she jabs). Scarcity ofenjambed verbs hightens apathy and mutes the poems energy. (I

have a comment: this technique is like smothering a grenade with

your body the poems passivity makes its subject (madness)

somehow more horrible.) Dissipated colloquial syntax; contractions;

words which continue to be hard, lyric, alliterative; and metrics

which are less forced, give us the effect of real, and human, (hence

endearing) speech. Robert Frost once wrote A sentence is a sound in

itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. The

sentence sounds are very definite entities...as definite as words...(and)

are apprehended by the ear.... The most original writer only catches

them from talk, there they grow spontaneously.56 Lowell is

surprisingly original.

This is a rudimentary discussion of what is a very complex

poem: here it serves only as a point of departure for other discussions

56Robert Frost, The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Lawrence Thompson, ed. (New York, 1964) 110.


34/40

34

of those technical signatures which disappear, and those which

remain, through Lowells poetic development.

One of Lowells best and most famous poems is Dolphin. It is

the culmination of a mature style. It is also frightfully difficult. The

free verse meter searched for in Skunk Hour -- not reminiscent of

any other free verse meter I have read -- is culminated in this poem.

The personal, sublime, style, struggled for in the sonnets of

Notebook, and History, is here achieved. The symbols are rooted in

Lowells life -- not in literature. Even Racine and Phdre seem present

to add personal, not literary, weight.57 I have chosen Dolphinbecause it makes, or should make, brutally clear that the way that I

read The Drunken Fisherman is the only way Lowells poems can

be, or should be, read.

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

captive as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phdre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangmans not 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,

57Lowell translated Racines Phdre in 1961. Here Phdre seems like Helen in W.B. Yeats No Second

Troy. In Yeats poem, Helen is used to tie his lifes love, Maude Gonne, to a character of great historic, and

literary, beauty. In Lowells poem, I would suggest he does the same for Lady Caroline: by comparison

with Phdre, Lady Caroline is rendered beautiful and immortal in one stroke.


35/40

35

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.

I do not understand all of it, but what I do understand I love,

and what I dont understand I love almost more.My dolphin, you only

guide me by surprise. Dolphin was Lowells love term for his thirdwife Lady Caroline Gordon; the poem itself is an address, a note of

thanks, and a plea for forgiveness. You only guide me by surprise

seems to me a statement about how all our loved ones surprise us

with affection, kindness, and love -- even when we may not think

ourselves deserving. When I was troubled in mind is brilliantly

understated: Lowell suffered from the horrific (both to himself and

those around him), cyclonic, fits of the manic-depressive for most of

his life. You made for my body/ caught in its hangmans knot of sinking

lines,58/ the glassy bowing and scraping of my will.... The article is not

clear: made what? Made for here means to go to the dolphin is

swimming (or swam) toward a drowning, helpless, sailor (see

footnote). These lines are almost impenetrably, and personally,

symbolic; they do create a tone of desperation, mysteriousness (of

58Recall the image of the drowned sailor in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket; to wit, When the

drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light/ Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,/ he grappled at

the net/ with the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs. These lines of Dolphin restate the myth of

Palaemon who was drowned near Corinth; dolphins are honored by sailors as sailing mens protectors. This

passage is also reminiscent of Miltons O ye Dolphins, waft the helpless youth. (from Lycidas) The

speaker of Dolphin is still in the act of sinking: is yet within the Dolphins reach.


36/40

36

someone fascinatingly in love?) -- humans cant breathe underwater

like fish -- for some reason, only thisDolphin can, or wants to, save

him. The ellipsis at the end dramatizes the action: we dont know if

the dolphin arrives in time or not. Will is the Puritan source of

sensibility. I have sat and listened to too many/ words of the collaborating

muse. Collaborating can mean helpful, but it can also mean

treacherous, inclined to betray. Perhaps the muse, Lowells poetry, is

responsible for his drowning (whatever that may mean -- madness,

sadness, suicide: we just dont know). The lines not avoiding injury to

others,/ not avoiding injury to myself--/ to ask compassion... are brutallyhuman, torn through with feeling. As we get older, we see the

damage that we do to others; but we also see the recompense of joy

that the damage brings to us. I think that is what these lines mean: in

marrying Lady Caroline, Lowell threw away a marriage of twenty-

five years with Elizabeth Hardwick. Lady Caroline, the Dolphin, is

his saving grace, the recompense of joy she brings keeps him from

sinking beneath the waters of sadness, life, or madness. These lines

quaver with doubt: maybe I should, maybe I shouldnt have.

Notice he asks for compassion (helpful, merciful), not pity (to feel

sorry for). When we read the lines this book, half fiction,/ an eelnet made

by man for the eel fighting, and think back to early poems,

remembering an eel is a long snakelike marine fish,59we see the New

England language of fishing, the imagery of the Grail legend, the

59Eel is used obliquely in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: to wit blast the eelgrass about a

waterclock/ of bilge and backwash....


37/40

37

Fisher-King of Eliots The Waste Land reasserted and changed.60

Unlike The Drunken Fisherman, who is drunk, randy, money mad,

and angry; Dolphins fisherman is passive, fate accepted.

The words of this poem, as did the individual words and

phrases of The Drunken Fisherman, deserve our full attention.

Verbs in the first half of the poem are quiet, self-effacing; they require

other people, companions, or agents:guide, captive, drawn, (you) made,

bowing, scraping, listened.The verbs of the latter half are active:plotted,

ask, made, and did. Obliquely, the passive first and more active second

half of the poem give us the wrestle to the death for the light ofmeaning I mentioned earlier: here the wrestling is naked what is

emotionally clear in The Drunken Fisherman is so, here, verbally.

In a general way Lowells mature style follows Wallace Stevenss

Make it Abstract: the words are airy -- rooted in, not outside of, the

mind. The poem is still an event, an action, but the landscape is not

Boston Common, a river, or Maine, but rather the inside of Mr.

Lowells head a landscape comprised of his experience, prejudices,

and strikingly personal images. Places are replaced by people

writers, their texts, his wife, and dislocated imagery.61 We would

expect a Lowell line with glassy, bowing, and scraping to read

something like the Glass Fisher bowed and scraped (then smashed)

his skull along the graves; in Dolphin, the words are used

60See footnote 11. Notice the fishing imagery of The Drunken Fisherman corresponds to the decorators

fishnet filled with orange cork in the fourth stanza of Skunk Hour; how net or cast or catch is

repeated in this (eelnet), and in many, many other Lowell poems.61The overall effect of dislocated images is disturbing in the poem; but if we read through the body of

Lowells work we see that these are not simply dislocated, but rather are images that were carefully

developed, nourished, grown, reworked, and reused. Though seemingly incongruous, these details dovetail

Dolphin with many other poems. Compare the images and tone of this poem to Fishnet, The Quaker

Graveyard in Nantucket, and dozens of others to see what I mean.


38/40

38

passively: the glassy and bowing and scraping of my will. The use of the

word willmakes the line psychological; lack of other concrete nouns

make the line doubly so. If we look at the nouns of the poem, man,

maze, composition, voice, Phdre, body, knot, will, words, will, muse, life,

injury, compassion, book, fiction, eelnet, man, eel, eyes, and hand only

knot, book, eel, net, eyes, and handcreate any sort of image in the

eye and mind. Unlike the details in Arthur Winslow and The

Drunken Fisherman, details seem unconnected: we must, instead of

being able to delineate ties between images, take it on faith

connections are there. Of the adjectives iron, incomparable, wandering,hangmans, sinking, glassy, (too) many, collaborating, (too) freely, and half,

only iron, hangmans, sinking, and glassyare visual or liven images;

only hangmans (to line), iron (to maze), and sinking (to lines) refer to

solid, titillating, visual nouns. The overall effect of the words, their

contexts, is, at worst, deeply moving, at best, heart rending.

Like Skunk Hour, and for the same reasons, the language is

colloquial, giving the familiarity of thoughts or thought processes.

There are weak places in the poem, I feel, but I am unable to pinpoint

them because Dolphin is a whole greater and more touching than

the sum of its worst and best parts. Images of hard things -- glass,

mirrors, iron, knots; the negatives; the passive verbs: all are still

signs, or signals, of internal weather. It is a poem about Lowells

fears, his love, his regret, and finally his resignation to what his life

has become, what it will be, and what it has been. The cumulative

effect is a sense of sadness, powerlessness: it is hard to find words

good enough for it. This poem is full of personal truth: what is said is

not often said in words, much less in poems. What is unexpressed is


39/40

39

almost more touching. The details, instead of being hammered into

our heads like nails through enjambments, syntax, and diction

are allowed to develop their own accents. Extended use of dash and

ellipsis (....) is made to dramatize Lowells (and our own) fear of

going, sometimes inability to go, beyond a certain level of

psychological pain here they are so effective because he dives, or

gives the illusion of diving, far deeper than most of us ever will, or

could. The dash, like the ellipsis, welds elements of the poem

together (it ties myself to fighting) while giving the sense of the

quickness of, and the abrupt breaks in, human thought. In the finalline my eyes have seen what my hand did the syntax again is Latin: my

hand did what my eyes have seen is another way it could be read.

The way it is written is more powerful. It gives us the Greek and

Roman way of thinking of literary authorship that it is gods (or

God's) gift, as inescapable as breathing...or your own hand. It creates

a certain horror in us because the image is, ostensibly, as if the hand

has, somewhere between the fingers and wrist, a brain of its own.

The eyes, meaning the human brain theyre connected to, are

powerless to stop what that hand is doing. As our habits, worries,

angers, and fears often keep us from stopping what our hands do.

This is as far as I could go with Dolphin: it is an

incredibly rewarding, but brutally difficult poem to work with. What

ties the elements of this paper together. The symbol of the Fisher-

King: it is one of the most important literary symbols of the twentieth

century -- nearly every poet of stature has written of it.62 We owe

62See W.B. Yeats The Fisherman for a shockingly close example.


40/40

40

much to Robert Lowell, for renewing the legend; and for allowing us,

through his poems, if only for a moment, to remember what the

rigors of our world take from us.

robert-lowells-poetry robert lowell's poetry matthew hanson

Documents