Seamus Heaney believed that Lowell’s repeated use of the word “net” in his poetry reflected a tactical maneuver of sorts; far from being just a fisher’s net, it was the net thrown by the retiarius in the gladiator’s arena. Poetry was a way of dealing with the world. “Lowell’s poetry didn’t attack the world,” Heaney said, “but it was aware that the world was an enemy of sorts, a certain kind of public world was at enmity with certain kinds of attitudes and so the poetry was at once a net that dragged things out of himself, but it was a style of net waving that warded off and was—was a weapon almost, you know, for certain values.”
“Flayed” and “flesh” and “exposed” were words that came naturally to Lowell. Part biblical, part Iliad, they were chinks in armor that he consciously set about to fill. Lowell was vulnerable, but he was also determined not to let it keep him from going where he wanted to go as a man and a poet. “Don’t keep me waiting,” he wrote to a lover when he was manic. “It’s like hanging on a meat-hook, going through a vegetable grinder, like being one of those pictures of flayed men—all purple and nerves—on an anatomical chart!” “Flayed” was a good word. He told Ezra Pound that “shedding one’s costume, one’s fancy dress, is like being flayed.” Three months later he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “The thought of going back to Boston sometimes makes me feel like a flayed man, who stands quivering and shivering in his flesh, while holding out a hand for his old sheet of skin.”
A man might stand against the night, Lowell said, but then “the shell breaks and the cold air tortures the exposed flesh.” The protection, the “great callousness,” lasts for a while; then the world or madness or too close an encounter with danger breaks through it. One must put on the shield again, don again the “battle array against the fire.” Throughout his life’s work—from Lord Weary’s Castle to Day by Day—Lowell wrote about exposure and the attraction and danger of fire; he wrote about the courage to live boldly in spite of seeing and feeling too much “with one skin-layer missing.”
Not only man had courage. Lowell gave it also to the occasional animal in his poetry, the creature who faced the dark and who stood, not ran. In one of his last poems, an old turtle—the armored animal he wrote into several of his poems—wades out into life and illusory hope. It wears its useless shield, its “foolsdream of armor.” Still, it wades out.
I pray for memory—
an old turtle,
absentminded, inelastic,
kept afloat by losing touch…
no longer able to hiss or lift
a useless shield against the killer.
Turtles age, but wade out amorously,
half-frozen fossils, yet knight-errant
in a foolsdream of armor.
In “Words for Muffin, a Guinea-Pig,” Mrs. Muffin—the “small mop,” the “short pound God threw on the scales”—denies fearing the dark and the brevity of life; she will not scare:
“Of late they leave the light on in my entry,
so I won’t scare, though I never scare in the dark;
I bless this arrow that flies from wall to window…
five years and a nightlight given me to breathe—
Heidegger said spare time is ecstasy….
I am not scared, although my life was short.”
In “Skunk Hour,” Lowell’s most often quoted and anthologized poem, his account of the dark night of the soul, the cracking of his mind—“I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat…./ I myself am hell; / nobody’s here”—is followed immediately by the image of skunks marching “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.
“This is the dark night,” Lowell said about the poem. “I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus about reaching some final darkness where the one free act is suicide. Out of this comes the march and affirmation, an ambiguous one, of my skunks in the last two stanzas.” Elsewhere he described the skunks as “indomitable,” symbols of “horrible blind energy,” “quixotic” and “absurd.” They were defiant. From darkness and emptiness a new style of poetry, the soul of Life Studies, had come to him, he wrote. It was “freedom and an accomplishment after more or less staring into the wall. I meant the skunks at the end to move with their thud of triumph. My whole sad, hesitating journey to their walk is perhaps no less so—tactics of survival stopping so as not to stop.” The last line of “Skunk Hour,” the final poem in Life Studies—a work of courage and originality written during, and in the aftermath of, a particularly terrible attack of mania, months of depression and personal upheaval; a work of psychological and imaginative genius—is, notably and unforgettably, “and will not scare.”
To create great art requires toughness, eyes that do not avert their gaze, and intellect that does not back away from the great, hard subjects: love, betrayal, suffering, madness, war, death. Truth is not always an uplifting thing; human nature is flawed. Madness often kills that which matters most. To continue to live and work, to keep faith in love and words, friends and work and music, requires stopping one’s ears to paralyzing terror. It is not for the faint of heart. Art is the “ruthless cutting edge that records and celebrates and prophesies on the stone tablets of time,” wrote the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown. He knew this, as he knew depression and the myths of his Orkney race: “A too-refined sensibility could not do that stern work.”
Lowell, who spent time with George Mackay Brown on his late-life trip to Orkney to trace the ancestral roots of his poetry and madness, put it plainly. “We must all live by taking a few uncontrolled screams—in our stride.”
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Jonathan Edwards’s Spider Letter, 1723 Credit 32
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;
What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
A very little thing, a little worm,
Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It’s well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy
On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly—
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
/>
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?
Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast
Into a brick-kiln where the blast
Fans your quick vitals to a coal—
If measured by a glass,
How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.
As a young man Lowell had read deeply in the life and writings of his mother’s ancestor, the eighteenth-century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards. “He was an ancestor,” Lowell said, “but this doesn’t make our relation exactly personal—another grandfather.” Perhaps, but early on in Lowell’s life, Edwards’s work impressed upon him a belief in the hardness of life and the need to summon the courage to face what the pain of the world would deliver him. Edwards’s writings stamped Lowell’s religious and historical thinking, as well his early poetry. Lowell abandoned his initial plan to write a biography of Edwards, but he returned to his life and work as the inspiration for four poems, including one of his greatest, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” which was published in Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946. Thirty years later, a few months before he died, it was one of the poems Lowell read during his last public reading at Harvard.
Lowell and Edwards shared more than blood. Both took language in original directions and both were decisively shaped by New England Puritanism, although its hold was more fierce and lasting upon Edwards. They felt the weight of ancestral madness. (Edwards’s grandmother was insane—her husband stated in their divorce proceedings that she “often threaten[ed] my Life to Cut my Throat when I was asleep”—and one of her brothers and a sister were declared by the court to be non compos mentis, one a “lunatic,” the other “mad.” Another brother was convicted of murder and executed.)
Both Lowell and Edwards knew the persuasive power of ecstatic states and drew from them. They knew, too, the downward lure of melancholy. Edwards wrote repeatedly in his diary and letters that he was shadowed and often overwhelmed by unshakeable depression. “I have a constitution peculiarly unhappy,” he said, “a low tide of spirits.” Both lived captive to the cycles of their moods, the “dull-decay-revising” cycles, as Edwards put it. They were close observers of the natural world and saw no contradiction to charting its beauty and decay in the same mental tract of land. Lowell and Edwards took in a full measure of the earth’s beauty; as much, or more so, they took in its brute darkness. They exerted their preternatural wills to master their suffering. Neither extended an easy consolation to those for whom they wrote.
Edwards, like Lowell, moved with ease in vast intellectual and psychological spaces, whether they were in the natural world or in the world of ideas and experience. “The immense magnificence of the visible world is inconceivable vastness,” wrote Edwards in 1728, “the incomprehensible height of the heavens, etc. is but a type of the infinite magnificence, height and glory of God’s work in the spiritual world: the most incomprehensible expression of his power, wisdom, holiness and love, in what is wrought and brought to pass in that world.” Glory was mutable; a mood of light or ecstasy could and did tip to its counter pole. In Edwards’s mind, as in Lowell’s, the “exuberant goodness of the creator” sat in the same hard pew with the annihilating wrath of God. Glory and damnation were in the hands of the Creator; man of necessity could be nothing next to this.
In a sermon whose title left little to the imagination, and spurred it to blood, “The Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable,” Jonathan Edwards spoke to his congregation of God’s force and dark intentions toward sinful man: “What art thou in the hands of the great God, who made heaven and earth by speaking a word?” he asked. “What art thou, when dealt with by that strength, which manages all this vast universe, holds the globe of the earth, directs all the motions of the heavenly bodies from age to age, and, when the fixed time shall come, will shake all to pieces?” Christ, who keeps the key of hell, “shuts and no man opens.” It was the will of God made manifest through the word of Edwards. The fixed time will come, the earth will shake to pieces. Sinners will have no rest; there will be not so much as a drop of water to cool their tongues. They will burn in fire and brimstone. Forever, beyond forever.
In “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” Lowell wrote, he was “trying to get a little prose piece and two Edwards’s sermons into Donne’s St. Lucy stanza. I thought it was odd that Edwards liked real spiders as a boy and figure of speech spiders as a preacher. There were several years when he seriously thought through morbidity that he was the worst man who ever lived; but he was really a modest, rational, mystical sort of man—not all the terror and brimstone one I picture.”
Lowell’s portrayal of Edwards in his poetry is complex. He took words and phrases from Edwards’s writings, as he did from Thoreau and would in the future from others, and put the words to his own use. He gave full portrait to Edwards as a young man who, entranced, watched spiders with awe and carefulness near his boyhood home. Young, less worn by life and moods, his spiders then were free, ballooning creatures of the air. They sailed, moved on by a calm wind, marched in the air from tree to tree. They were dangling creatures of heaven: “I have seen vast multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings,” he observed, “brightly reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of a great length, and at such a height that one would think that they were tacked to the vault of the heavens.”
In “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” Lowell re-created the quiet exuberance of the young Edwards, vital with God’s presence in the world:
As a boy, you built a booth
in a swamp for prayer;
lying on your back,
you saw the spiders fly,
basking at their ease,
swimming from tree to tree—
so high, they seemed tacked to the sky.
You knew they would die.
………
Then God’s love shone in sun, moon and stars,
on earth, in the waters,
in the air, in the loose winds,
which used to greatly fix your mind.
In “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” however, Lowell turned to the older, darker Edwards for words. The Jonathan Edwards who as a youth had described the beauty of the marching, flying, swimming spiders was now the preacher of hell. Mood had darkened, mildewed. The once billowing spider had spun into an agent of hopelessness: “They purpose nothing but their ease and die / Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea.”
The spider dies, thrown into “the bowels of fierce fire” where “full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.” The “incomprehensible height of the heavens” had become the fire of incomprehensible suffering, a pit of slow and lingering death, one that would exact a brutal justice past the end of time. The Old Testament wrath of the Almighty was bent on rooting out the decay in man and his makings; like the Achillian wrath that seared Lowell’s early poetry, it would later sear his mind when he was mad.
The epigraph to Edwards’s sermon about God’s punishment of the wicked was taken from Ezekiel 22:14: “Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong in the days that I shall deal with thee?” Edwards renders this in his sermon: “How then will thine hands be strong, or thine heart endure?…What then canst thou do in the hands of God? It is vain to set the briars and thorns in battle array against glowing flames; the points of thorns, though sharp, do nothing to withstand the fire.”
Lowell thrusts man’s struggle into the heart of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.” We know the ravages from insanity that will come to Lowell, and two lines stop the pulse:
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
It would not be in vain to set the battle array agai
nst the fire, to play with all stops out against a disease past a cure. But it was to be hard tackling.
Robert Lowell in Boston, 1959
“I’ve got my book off at last….I’m in the fine mood of an author with a new style and feel nothing else I’ve ever done counts.” Credit 33
Life Studies, 1959
“After Life Studies, as after The Waste Land, nothing has quite been the same.” Credit 34
V
ILLNESS AND ART
Something Altogether Lived
During this time I have had five manic depressive breakdowns: short weeks of Messianic rather bestial glow, when I have to be in a hospital, then dark months of indecision, emptiness etc. So the dark and light are not mere decoration and poetic imagery, but something altogether lived, inescapable. Even survival has had to be fought and fought for.
—Letter to Chard Powers Smith, October 3, 1959
11
A Magical Orange Grove in a Nightmare
There is personal anguish everywhere. We can’t dodge it, shouldn’t worry that we are uniquely marked and fretted, and must somehow keep even-tempered, amused and in control. John B. [Berryman] in his mad way keeps talking about something evil stalking us poets. That’s a bad way to talk, but there’s truth in it.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 28