New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  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:

  The resident doctor said,

  “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,

  Then it had swallowed us up quick.”

  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,