New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  talking to myself, or reading, or writing,

  or fearlessly holding back nothing from a friend,

  who believes me for a moment

  to keep up conversation.

  I was surer, wasn’t I, once …

  and had flashes when I first found

  a humor for myself in images,

  farfetched misalliance

  that made evasion a revelation?

  Dr. Merrill Moore, the family psychiatrist,

  had unpresentable red smudge eyebrows,

  and no infirmity for tact—

  in his conversation or letters,

  each phrase a new

  paragraph,

  implausible as the million

  sonnets he rhymed into his dictaphone,

  or dashed on windshield writing-pads,

  while waiting out a stoplight—

  scattered pearls, some true.

  Dead he is still a mystery,

  once a crutch to writers in crisis.

  I am two-tongued, I will not admit

  his Tennessee rattling saved my life.

  Did he become mother’s lover

  and prey

  by rescuing her from me?

  He was thirteen years her junior …

  When I was in college, he said, “You know

  you were an unwanted child?”

  Was he striking my parents to help me?

  I shook him off the scent by pretending

  anyone is unwanted in a medical sense—

  lust our only father … and yet

  in that world where an only child

  was a scandal—

  unwanted before I am?

  That year Carl Jung said to mother in Zurich,

  “If your son is as you have described him,

  he is an incurable schizophrenic.”

  In 1916

  father on sea-duty, mother with child

  in one house with her affectionate mother-in-law,

  unconsuming, already consumptive …

  bromidic to mother … Mother,

  I must not blame you for carrying me in you

  on your brisk winter lunges across

  the desperate, refusey Staten Island beaches,

  their good view skyscrapers on Wall Street …

  for yearning seaward, far from any home, and saying,

  “I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead.”

  Unforgivable for a mother to tell her child—

  but you wanted me to share your good fortune,

  perhaps, by recapturing the disgust of those walks;

  your credulity assumed we survived,

  while weaklings fell with the dead and dying.

  That consuming love,

  woman’s everlasting cri de coeur,

  “When you have a child of your own, you’ll know.”

  Her dowry for her children …

  One thing is certain—compared with my wives,

  mother was stupid. Was she?

  Some would not have judged so—

  among them, her alcoholic patients,

  those raconteurish, old Boston young men,

  whose fees, late in her life

  and to everyone’s concern,

  she openly halved with Merrill Moore.

  Since time out of mind, mother’s gay hurting

  assessments of enemies and intimates

  had made her a formidable character

  to her “reading club,” seven ladies,

  who since her early twenties

  met once a week through winters

  in their sitting rooms for confidence and tea—

  she couldn’t read a book …

  How many of her statements began with,

  But Papá always said or Oh Bobby …

  if she Byronized her father and son,

  she saw her husband as a valet sees through a master.

  She was stupider than my wife …

  When I was three months,

  I rocked back and forth howling

  for weeks, for weeks each hour …

  Then I found the thing I loved most

  was the anorexia Christ

  swinging on Nellie’s gaudy rosary.

  It disappeared, I said nothing,

  but mother saw me poking strips of paper

  down a floor-grate to the central heating.

  “Oh Bobby, do you want to set us on fire?”

  “Yes … that’s where Jesus is.” I smiled.

  Is the one unpardonable sin

  our fear of not being wanted?

  For this, will mother go on cleaning house

  for eternity, and making it unlivable?

  Is getting well ever an art,

  or art a way to get well?

  Thanks-Offering for Recovery

  The airy, going house grows small

  tonight, and soft enough to be crumpled up

  like a handkerchief in my hand.

  Here with you by this hotbed of coals,

  I am the homme sensuel, free

  to turn my back on the lamp, and work.

  Something has been taken off,

  a wooden winter shadow—

  goodbye nothing. I give thanks, thanks—

  thanks too for this small

  Brazilian ex voto, this primitive head

  sent me across the Atlantic by my friend …

  a corkweight thing,

  to be offered Deo gratias in church

  on recovering from head-injury or migraine—

  now mercifully delivered in my hands,

  though shelved awhile unnoticing and unnoticed.

  Free of the unshakable terror that made me write …

  I pick it up, a head holy and unholy,

  tonsured or damaged,

  with gross black charcoaled brows and stern eyes

  frowning as if they had seen the splendor

  times past counting … unspoiled,

  solemn as a child is serious—

  light balsa wood the color of my skin.

  It is all childcraft, especially

  its shallow, chiseled ears,

  crudely healed scars lumped out

  to listen to itself, perhaps, not knowing

  it was made to be given up.

  Goodbye nothing. Blockhead,

  I would take you to church,

  if any church would take you …

  This winter, I thought

  I was created to be given away.

  Epilogue

  Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—

  why are they no help to me now

  I want to make

  something imagined, not recalled?

  I hear the noise of my own voice:

  The painter’s vision is not a lens,

  it trembles to caress the light.

  But sometimes everything I write

  with the threadbare art of my eye

  seems a snapshot,

  lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

  heightened from life,

  yet paralyzed by fact.

  All’s misalliance.

  Yet why not say what happened?

  Pray for the grace of accuracy

  Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

  stealing like the tide across a map

  to his girl solid with yearning.

  We are poor passing facts,

  warned by that to give

  each figure in the photograph

  his living name.

  from

  Last Poems

  (1977)

  Summer Tides

  Tonight

  I watch the incoming moon swim

  under three agate veins of cloud,

  casting crisps of false silver-plate

  to the thirsty granite fringe of the shore.

  Yesterday, the sun’s gregarious sparklings;

  tonight, the moon has no satellite.

  All this spendthrift, in-the-house summer,


  our yacht-jammed harbor

  lay unattempted—

  pictorial to me like your portrait.

  I wonder who posed you so artfully

  for it in the prow of his Italian skiff,

  like a maiden figurehead without legs to fly.

  Time lent its wings. Last year

  our drunken quarrels had no explanation,

  except everything, except everything.

  Did the oak provoke the lightning,

  when we heard its boughs and foliage fall?…

  My wooden beach-ladder swings by one bolt,

  and repeats its single creaking rhythm—

  I cannot go down to the sea.

  After so much logical interrogation,

  I can do nothing that matters.

  The east wind carries disturbance for leagues—

  I think of my son and daughter,

  and three stepdaughters

  on far-out ledges

  washed by the dreaded clock-clock of the waves …

  gradually rotting the bulwark where I stand.

  Their father’s unmotherly touch

  trembles on a loosened rail.

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Poem titles are italicized.

  A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—

  A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath

  A mongrel image for all summer, our scene at breakfast

  Abraham Lincoln

  After the Democratic Convention

  Again and then again … the year is born

  All day I bang and bang at you in thought

  “All our French poets can turn an inspired line

  Another Summer

  Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise

  At Beverly Farms, a portly, uncomfortable boulder

  At dawn, the crisp goodbye of friends; at night

  Back and forth, back and forth

  Beethoven

  Between the Porch and the Altar

  Beyond the Alps

  Blizzard in Cambridge

  Bobby Delano

  Boston’s used bookshops, anachronisms from London

  BRINGING A TURTLE HOME

  Brunetto Latini

  Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year

  Buttercups

  By miracle, I left the party half

  Caligula

  Caroline in Sickness

  Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom

  Circles

  Close the Book

  Coleridge

  Coleridge stands, he flamed for the one friend.…

  Couple, The

  Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing

  Day, The

  Dolphin

  Dream, the Republican Convention

  Edwards’ great millstone and rock

  End of a Year

  Epilogue

  Exorcism

  Eye and Tooth

  Eyes shut, I hunt the vision through my eyelids

  Ezra Pound

  Fall 1961

  Father’s Bedroom

  Fishnet

  Five Dreams

  For Elizabeth Bishop 4

  For Robert Kennedy 1925–68

  For Sale

  For the Union Dead

  Gone now the baby’s nurse

  Grass Fires

  Half a year, then a year and a half, then

  HARRIET, BORN JANUARY 4, 1957

  Her Dead Brother

  Here in my workroom, in its listlessness

  History

  History has to live with what was here

  Home After Three Months Away

  Horizontal on a deckchair in the ward

  Hospital I

  I fish until the clouds turn blue

  I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid

  I saw the sky descending, black and white

  I saw the spiders marching through the air

  “… I was playing records on Sunday

  In my Father’s bedroom

  In the Cage

  In the realistic memory

  Infinite, The

  It was a Maine lobster town—

  It’s amazing

  Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts

  July in Washington

  Last Walk?

  Late Summer

  Leaves espaliered jade on our barn’s loft window

  Lesson, The

  Life, hope, they conquer death, generally, always

  Logan Airport, Boston

  Long Summer

  Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich, A

  Man and Wife

  Marriage

  Meeting his mother makes him lose ten years

  Memories of West Street and Lepke

  Mermaid

  Mermaid Emerging

  MOTHER AND SON

  Mr. Edwards and the Spider

  My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise

  My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula

  My sidestepping and obliquities, unable

  My whole eye was sunset red

  Napoleon

  Nautilus Island’s hermit

  Near the Ocean

  New Year’s Day

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  New York

  Nihilist as Hero, The

  91 Revere Street

  No longer to lie reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles

  Notice

  O to break loose, like the chinook

  Obit

  … “Oh, Oh”

  OLD ORDER, THE

  On the End of the Phone

  On the road to Bangor, we spotted a domed stone

  On this book, large enough to write on

  Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

  Our cookbook is bound like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—

  Our Dead Poets

  Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—

  OUR TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY I (ELIZABETH)

  Pastime

  Pigeons

  Planes arc like arrows through the highest sky

  Plotted

  Poet at Seven, The

  Poor sheepish plaything

  Public Garden, The

  Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The

  Randall Jarrell

  Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge

  Records

  Redcliffe Square

  Risen from the blindness of teaching to bright snow

  Robert Frost

  Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone

  Sailing Home from Rapallo

  Seesaw

  Shaving

  Shaving’s the one time I see my face

  Shifting Colors

  SHOES

  Skunk Hour

  Soft Wood

  Sometimes I have supposed seals

  Square of Black

  Suburban Surf

  Summer

  Summer Tides

  Sylvia Plath

  T. S. Eliot

  Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed

  Ten Minutes

  Terminal Days at Beverly Farms

  Thanks-Offering for Recovery

  That hill pushed off by itself was always dear

  That night the mustard bush and goldenrod

  That unhoped-for Irish sunspoiled April day

  The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has

  The airy, going house grows small

  The book is finished and the air is lighter

  The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo

  “The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open

  The institutions of society

  The labor to breathe
that younger, rawer air

  The lifers file into the hall

  The Lion of St. Mark’s upon the glass

  The new painting must live on iron rations

  The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore

  The night dark before its hour—

  The old South Boston Aquarium stands

  The resident doctor said

  The same old flights, the same old homecomings

  The single sheet keeps shifting on the double bed

  The stiff spokes of this wheel

  Their lines string out from nowhere, stretch to sorrow

  These conquered kings pass furiously away

  They are all outline, uniformly gray

  This morning, as if I were home in Boston, snow

  Those Before Us

  Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—

  To Delmore Schwartz

  “To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage”

  Tonight

  Tonight the full moon is stopped by trees

  Too late, all shops closed—

  Too many go express to the house of rest

  Tops of the midnight trees move helter-skelter

  “Twice in the past two weeks I think I met

  Unorthodox sleep in the active hour

  Unwanted

  WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING

  Waking in the Blue

  Water

  We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!

  We were middle-class and verismo

  “We’re all Americans, except the Doc

  “When the Pulitzers showered on some dope

  When the timeless, daily, tedious affair

  When we were children our papas were stout

  Where the Rainbow Ends

  Who loved more? William Carlos Williams

  WILDROSE

  Will Not Come Back

  William Carlos Williams

  WINDOW

  Words for Hart Crane

  You lie in my insomniac arms

  Your blouse

  Your nurse could only speak Italian

  ALSO BY ROBERT LOWELL

  Land of Unlikeness (1944)

  Lord Weary’s Castle (1946)

  The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)

  Life Studies (1959)

  Phaedra (translation) (1961)

  Imitations (1961)

  For the Union Dead (1964)

  The Old Glory (plays) (1965)

  Near the Ocean (1967)

  The Voyage & Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1969)

  Prometheus Bound (translation) (1969)

  Notebook 1967–68 (1969) (Notebook, revised and expanded edition, 1970)

  History (1973)

  For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)

  The Dolphin (1973)

  Selected Poems (1976) (revised edition, 1977)