of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
(“Memories of West Street and Lepke”)
But here, facts are married to confusion—a Jehovah’s Witness starts as an unrecognizable J.W. and ends as a “jailbird.” Writes Lowell in Notebook, “dates fade faster than we do.” By the way, a C.O. is a conscientious objector, and Lowell’s conversion to Catholicism made him one in the Second World War, for more than a few days in his life, for a year—but for the purpose of his art, only for a poem or two. Whoever Robert Lowell really was, his poems remember how many times he changed who he was.
In Lowell’s poetry, no two days are alike—time moves on. We don’t always remember the fact, but we are nearly always seared by the way a fact feels. Randall Jarrell said that Elizabeth Bishop’s work was marked by the conviction “I have seen it”; Lowell’s radiates with the vaguer credibility “I have felt it,” emotional and somatic. Felt in the body, one’s understood context becomes unstable: “I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small” (“Home After Three Months Away”). Lowell could find real knowledge only in the earthly, the biographical. In poetry, now, we take this for granted—how many volumes are prized for their “personal story,” individually held but collectively validated, structured not simply by suffering but by some assumed faith in the reader’s response to it? But Lowell took a different view of the relationship between personal experience and knowledge. Just because the facts of the life provided the only basis for what could be known in poetry didn’t mean you could know very much.
I meant to write about our last walk.
We had nothing to do but gaze—
seven years, now nothing but a diverting smile,
dalliance by a river, a speeding swan …
the misleading promise
to last with joy as long as our bodies,
nostalgia pulverized by thought,
nomadic as yesterday’s whirling snow,
all whiteness splotched.
(“Last Walk?”)
In this sense, Lowell is still ahead of his time, or at least outside it. To assert both that personal experience was the only way you could know anything and that you couldn’t really know very much that way is to see the “freedom” of contemporary experience as both vibrantly lived and meaningfully limited. Such a perspective leaves one very much stranded in the present, by which I mean, facing reality.
* * *
In a certain political neighborhood of our contemporary world, we like to use the word “privilege” to describe people such as Lowell—white, male, funded, educated, carriers of social position and family name (two of his cousins were notable American poets, and his mother descended from a Constitution signer). Lately, in American poetry, we like not liking people like that, and we distrust privilege as we would a mask. But on the human level, birth is an accident:
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
(“Sailing Home from Rapallo”)
Death fades family names and disintegrates the hallmarks of prestige, and privilege can’t help you see. Lowell’s best work knows this. The poetic tradition has its own relationship with privilege: the history of poetry, crudely seen for years, was the history of those with the power and leisure to write it, white men. Lowell easily found his place in this history of poetry while he was alive. Maybe it’s time to let his work teach us about the history of the person instead. Lowell’s sonnet about Robert Frost from History has something to do with both—the poem crosses a moment of poetic inheritance with personal feeling. Lowell’s trying to find words for the actual mania he suffered, and it throws the expected patriarchal bonding with Frost a bit off-kilter:
Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,
his voice is musical and raw—he writes in the flyleaf:
For Robert from Robert, his friend in the art.
“Sometimes I feel too full of myself,” I say.
And he, misunderstanding, “When I am low,
I stray away…”
The poem ends with Lowell still trying to be understood—
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.”
(“Robert Frost”)
Frost does, in a sense, understand Lowell at the end. Though the sonnet is a moving testimony about the stigma of speaking about mental illness, it’s also something else—a displaced self-portrait in dialogue, a reckoning with how poetic privilege, prestige, renown, and the rest don’t translate into the kind of capital that builds life. Even “health,” the one privilege Lowell lacked (bipolar, he was hospitalized fourteen times for mania and once for depression), doesn’t add up to the kind of knowledge you can use that other people can necessarily share. He writes later toward his family, essentially rephrasing these lines of Frost’s: “… When most happiest / how do I know I can keep any of us alive?” (“Wild-rose” from “Another Summer”).
Nothing of “privilege” can mask Lowell’s authentic sense of his own limitations in his best poems. He relies not on “privilege” but on awareness to steady him through changes. He experiences knowledge, like the passage of time, as something withstood rather than possessed. Lowell’s signature sonic move was to turn the line in skilled but sudden enjambment, a break in the middle of a sense-unit. A reader hears it everywhere: “the audience gone / to vapor.” Such discord refuses the feeling of certainty in any poem; it can even approach one of the signature emotions of our times, fear. The family portraits of Life Studies come to a close with an eerie nocturne from blue-blooded Castine, Maine, “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to a friend, not a relative—Bishop. If you knew Lowell before picking up this New Selected Poems, you probably knew him from these lines:
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
But you can see him better in the ones that follow:
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
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.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
You can see him better as he sees himself—as a skunk. What he can’t see—the skunk’s head covered in whiteness—is what he is. It’s easy enough to read the skunk symbolically and credit Lowell with a poetic understanding of the foul way privilege can mask an understanding of the world in which white has masked black faces and bodies in destructive ways. To me, this is child’s play compared with how Lowell gets us to a possible place for self- recognition. He’s staring at an ordinary pest in his garbage, at the end of the day, in the midst of habit. The end of the poem corrects an ordinary narcissism—he thought he was the only one there, and discovers he’s not. He remembers the skunk as a “somebody”; the animal world marks his return to the ethical. He’s not just trying to see what he can’t see but admitting that he can’t see, after an entire poem about looking at a familiar view from an owned vantage point. At the end of the day, what is he doing on top of his back steps, if not “checking his privilege,” or at least imagining what it might look like if he could? In Lowell’s centennial year, the year of the inauguration of Donald Trump, I value this poem because it shows a white man willing to stay uncomfortable in the midst of cha
nge and uncertainty—a human person choosing the vulnerability of sharing a world rather than the deceiving strength of owning or partitioning one. The poet Christina Davis has pointed out to me that “Skunk Hour,” the title of the poem, is easily reversed to “our skunk,” a poetic form of ownership that actually makes possible a kind of “owning up.”
The events of Lowell’s actual biography made him give up a sense that his life would be either healthy or straightforward. His imagination enabled him to create work that still matters to us, none of whose lives seem, at this point, to be easily recognizable as either. His poems about mental illness anticipate a twenty- first-century culture in which having a diagnosis has become as overstated and necessary as having a college degree. In the best of these, illness refuses to pigeonhole itself as disability or dramatize itself as a privilege of the artist. “Notice,” from Day by Day, passes into the twenty-first century familiar to anyone who’s ever mistaken a medical professional for someone who can tell you the meaning of life:
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression—
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”
(“Notice”)
A poem like this doesn’t only anticipate a world in which no “normal” exists, either in psychological condition or in life plan: it imagines a world in which the idea of “the normal” has been almost forgotten. Nowhere is this understanding more moving than in Lowell’s treatment of his complicated family life, in Notebook, For Lizzie and Harriet, and especially The Dolphin, with his last two marriages braided together in time with children and stepchildren and across an ocean. Don’t we all wish we—or someone—could have planned our lives better? Lowell admits that feeling and lets it go. He stands vividly in the midst of experience, when all we’d thought we’d known demands to be known again. The final lines of “Notice” remind us how bravely Lowell stood in his own discomfort: “Then home—I can walk it blindfold. / But we must notice— / we are designed for the moment.”
Katie Peterson
Albany, California
from
Lord Weary’s Castle
(1946)
New Year’s Day
Again and then again … the year is born
To ice and death, and it will never do
To skulk behind storm-windows by the stove
To hear the postgirl sounding her French horn
When the thin tidal ice is wearing through.
Here is the understanding not to love
Our neighbor, or tomorrow that will sieve
Our resolutions. While we live, we live
To snuff the smoke of victims. In the snow
The kitten heaved its hindlegs, as if fouled,
And died. We bent it in a Christmas box
And scattered blazing weeds to scare the crow
Until the snake-tailed sea-winds coughed and howled
For alms outside the church whose double locks
Wait for St. Peter, the distorted key.
Under St. Peter’s bell the parish sea
Swells with its smelt into the burlap shack
Where Joseph plucks his hand-lines like a harp,
And hears the fearful Puer natus est
Of Circumcision, and relives the wrack
And howls of Jesus whom he holds. How sharp
The burden of the Law before the beast:
Time and the grindstone and the knife of God.
The Child is born in blood, O child of blood.
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
(FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
I.
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—
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,
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-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose
On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea
Where dreadnaughts shall confess
Its hell-bent deity,
When you are powerless
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. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and then repeat
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 your death
In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear
The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall
Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers 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
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 beast
Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.
III.
All you recovered from Poseidon died
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’s westward haven. To Cape Cod
Guns, cradled on the tide,
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
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
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news
Of IS, 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,
If God himself had not been on our side,
When the Atlantic rose against us, why,
IV.
This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell
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 a
t straws to sail
Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,
Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,
Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:
Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail
For water, for the deep where the high tide
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.
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;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
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
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole
And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
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,
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing 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.
VI.
OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM
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,
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
And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,