Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  “It was,” said a friend, “like a poem by Cal—only he’s not here to write it.”

  —The Washington Post

  Robert Lowell’s funeral was held in the late morning of September 16, 1977, at the Church of the Advent in Boston, a short walk from where he had been born. The church, antebellum and Anglo-Catholic, is Episcopal but rooted in the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, which sought a closer alignment between the Church of England and the Catholic Church. For Lowell, the Church of the Advent was a natural choice. He had been born and raised in the Episcopal Church but at times intensely drawn to Catholicism, for a period a convert to it. Like many who have ceased to believe the dogma, he had kept a strong spiritual and cultural tie with the traditions of his church.

  Lowell found religious and historical continuity in the hymns and rites of the Episcopal Church. He appreciated and took pleasure in the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. (“He used to go to Episcopal services,” Lowell’s doctor wrote in his admitting note at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in 1957; “he didn’t actually believe in the doctrine but he enjoyed the ceremony.” As recently as his admission to Massachusetts General Hospital a few months before his death, Lowell listed his religion as “Episcopalian.”) In response to a letter from Lowell in 1955, the rector of the Church of the Advent replied that he was “happy to report that Bishop Nash has formally restored you to communicant status and does not feel it is necessary for you to be ‘received back’ by him…as you started out in the Episcopal Church.”

  Lowell was as skeptical about religion as he was about most things, but he was serious. “After much irresolution I became an Episcopalian again (a high one),” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop. “I used to think one had to be a Catholic or nothing. I guess I’ve rather rudely expected life to be a matter of harsh clear alternatives. I don’t know what to say of my new faith; on the surface I feel eccentric, antiquarian, a superstitious, skeptical fussy old woman, but down under I feel something that makes sober sense and lets my eyes open.”

  Peter Taylor recalled attending Palm Sunday services with Lowell at the Church of the Advent two years before he died. “He appeared to be elated, even transported by the experience…so affected by the beauties of the music and the High Mass inside the church that he had kept up a running conversation on all of it to the companion beside him.” Lowell was, Taylor said, “grave and serene…responding to his religious environment, trying to embrace it, to comprehend it.” It was “a profound contemplation of the great mystery: What does life mean: What is it all about?”

  Lowell’s funeral and burial, planned by him and specified in his will, were his final public acts. His funeral was held within the walls of his beliefs and the traditions he knew; it was carried out within the ancient structure of his church. It was not only for his family, friends, and colleagues—some of whom found the requiem Mass cold, formal, stiff, unapproachable—but for history. The bodies of poets had been laid out on shields, sent out in long ships, burned on pyres, buried under stones carved with words of their own making. This was to be no different. The words and ritual of the high, solemn requiem Mass—its poetry, its structure, plot, and rhyme—were deep in him and chosen by him for his end.

  Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

  At the end of the Mass the priest faced Lowell’s coffin and recited the ancient consolation:

  Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Robert. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

  There followed the Nunc Dimittis that Lowell knew well: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace.” A peace was promised that he had not known.

  In his homily, the Reverend G. Harris Collingwood spoke from Genesis. “In the heart of chaos, God made form and order,” he said. “Out of the chaos he drew forth a Cosmos.” The chaos was maintained, kept at bay, and transformed into form and order, whether by the Creator in Genesis or by the poet in his work. “Robert Lowell knew intimately and painfully those dark chaotic forces forever threatening the firmament,” the priest continued. “But let us gather to give thanks for the light he kindled, and to pray for him and for ourselves, knowing that one day we too shall enter into death.”

  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

  —Genesis 1:2–4

  Always Lowell’s life and work had been about the opposing forces of creation and destruction; about exerting will over forces not easily given to control; about courage and valor arrayed against wrong and darkness. Always it was about shaping, about dark and light.

  There was a lone exception to the traditional structure of the requiem Mass. Peter Taylor read “Where the Rainbow Ends,” the last poem in Lord Weary’s Castle; he read the young Lowell’s passionate words about things deep to him across his life: God or not. Justice. Boston. Peace. Exile and grace:

  I saw my city in the Scales, the pans

  Of judgment rising and descending. Piles

  Of dead leaves char the air—

  And I am a red arrow on this graph

  Of Revelations. Every dove is sold.

  …………

  At the high altar, gold

  And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat

  My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give

  You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,

  The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

  After the funeral family members and close friends drove to Dunbarton in New Hampshire for the burial. The small group included Caroline Blackwood, Harriet Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick. “The family graveyard lay under a mist of rain,” Hardwick said later, “great trees and a few autumn leaves on the ground and the old gravestones.” It is a small graveyard, quiet, removed from the world and packed stone to stone with Winslows and Starks. Lowell, who is buried next to his mother and father, is only the second, and perhaps the last, Lowell to be buried at Dunbarton. Lowell had written often about his family graveyard in his poetry and letters. He associated it with trips he had made with his grandfather; he had keen recollections of the graves and leaves and the looming statue of Christ. He remembered “the black brook, the pruned fir trunks, the iron spear fence, and the memorial slates.” “Everything in Dunbarton was an oxymoron, a struggle of good and evil: the sun rose on frozen leaves; all physical and moral color was touched with Caravaggio like emphasis….I used to play about the graves of my ancestors. I dreamed with healthy, burning red cheeks and a mind mossy with the dates on the gravestones.”

  In “Dunbarton” he had written of his ancestors and those who were to follow:

  Grandfather and I

  raked leaves from our dead forebears,

  defied the dank weather

  with “dragon” bonfires.

  As Lowell’s coffin was lowered into the ground, Blackwood, Hardwick, and Harriet threw flowers into the grave, and the priest recited the familiar words of Committal from the Book of Common Prayer, laying to rest, calling for peace:

  In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Robert; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up his countenance upon him and give him peace.

  Lowell had chosen from his writing the epitaphs for the gravestones of his parents; his own is taken from “Endings,” in Day by Day:

  ROBERT LOWELL

&n
bsp; 1917–1977

  THE IMMORTAL IS SCRAPED

  UNCONSENTING FROM THE MORTAL

  A month after Lowell was buried, the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky visited Dunbarton. It was dark, he recalled, and it was hard to find Lowell’s grave. He began his elegy for Lowell, “Family Graveyard,” by describing the way Lowell had carried his head at an angle, like a violinist. Now there is no violin, Voznesensky said. “But there is. It is invisible.” “The maples in the graveyard now are bare; / And through the dark the violin thinly sounds. / The family graves lie deep within the wood: / Your parents both are there, but where in the dark are you?”

  A few months earlier, during his visit to Russia, Lowell had asked Voznesensky to take him to Boris Pasternak’s grave. There he saw the rowan tree near where Pasternak lay, whose brilliant berries deep in the winter symbolized for Pasternak life in death. Now Voznesensky laid on Lowell’s grave four branches from that rowan tree. “I still hear you,” he wrote: “And bring these berries from Pasternak’s rowan tree / For all the good that rowanberries do.”

  Other poets wrote elegies for Lowell, including Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Elizabeth Bishop. Heaney wrote of Lowell as Virgil and maker:

  You were our night ferry

  thudding in a big sea,

  the whole craft ringing

  with an armourer’s music

  the course set wilfully across

  the ungovernable and dangerous.

  Elizabeth Bishop’s elegy is heartbreaking, a tribute to her friend of so many years, her fellow poet and New Englander, both of them beholden to sea and nature and words, so different in temperament. “Frank [Bidart] read me your beautiful poem over the phone,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Bishop in August 1978. “I wept when I went to sit outside and think about it. Oh, the magical details of North Haven and the way you bring them with such naturalness and feeling into a human landscape, to Cal. Your art is always able to do that—and the genuineness, the lack of strain, the truth of things. The poem moves me unbearably.”

  Map of North Haven on notecard from Elizabeth Bishop, which Lowell was carrying when he died Credit 50

  North Haven

  In memoriam: Robert Lowell

  I can make out the rigging of a schooner

  a mile off; I can count

  the new cones on the spruce. It is so still

  the pale bay wears a milky skin, the sky

  no clouds, except for one long, carded horse’s tail.

  The islands haven’t shifted since last summer,

  even if I like to pretend they have

  —drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,

  a little north, a little south or sidewise,

  and that they’re free within the blue frontiers of bay.

  This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:

  Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,

  Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,

  the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,

  and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

  The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,

  and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song,

  pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.

  Nature repeats herself, or almost does:

  repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

  Years ago, you told me it was here

  (in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”

  and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.

  You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer

  (“Fun”—it always seemed to leave you at a loss…)

  You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,

  afloat in mystic blue…And now—you’ve left

  for good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange,

  your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)

  The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

  15

  He Is Out of Bounds Now

  On a thousand small town New England greens,

  the old white churches hold their air

  of sparse, sincere rebellion.

  —From “For the Union Dead”

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  March 2, 1978

  “The dead have no need for the living,” the minister said. “But the living have great need for the dead.” It was an apt comment for the day Harvard marked the death of Robert Lowell. Few drew upon the dead as Lowell had.

  After the minister finished his remarks, Walter Jackson Bate, the Lowell Professor of the Humanities and biographer of John Keats, walked to the lectern. He read from the Bible. The seventeenth-century language of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the New Testament had been to Lowell beautiful, much of it surpassingly so. The King James Version of the Psalms, he once said, was the highest expression of free verse. In the beginning was the Word, proclaimed the Gospel of John. It was fundamental. In the beginning was the Word.

  The poetry of Homer and Virgil had been as much a part of Lowell as the Bible, perhaps more. Robert Fitzgerald, translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey, knew the classicist in Lowell better than anyone. He had known Lowell for thirty years, been a pallbearer at his funeral; he had known him during his periods of great poetic originality and the years of drought, through his madness and his sustaining sanity. He had seen Lowell make art from his life. Lowell, he said now in his eulogy, had “exerted a giant’s pressure on language and experience.” Through “what he wrote and what he was,” Fitzgerald said, “he had dignified for many people their own metaphysical predicaments in the world of twentieth-century choices that, under great difficulties, he tried bravely to meet.” Lowell had exerted pressure on his country and on his students. “Just as in the world at large he embodied the best of social and political protest among the young, so for a generation of students here he embodied, as a Lowell, as a great poet, something intangible but profound in Harvard tradition.”

  Lowells had been part of Harvard for more than 250 years. They had been students before the American Revolution, had helped finance and administer Harvard. One had been its president. Lowell House was a landmark in Cambridge with its high blue bell tower visible from the Charles River and beyond. At times Robert Lowell had taken pride in his family ties to Harvard; as often he had found them suffocating. He had rebelled against the Lowell tradition of going to Harvard and resented the assumption, preached by his mother, that it was “what Lowells did.” After two years he found undergraduate study neither challenging nor enjoyable, and he left. In the end he had come back to Harvard to teach, the goose returning to its home bay. There was a pull, currents. He had written about only four places, Lowell once said. Harvard was one of them.

  Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, Boston Credit 51

  David Perkins, professor of English and American literature at Harvard, spoke after Robert Fitzgerald. He had faced a difficult choice, given the broad sweep of Lowell’s interests and work, but for his reading he picked “For the Union Dead,” which, he told those gathered, “may be the supreme poem of Lowell’s career.”

  For the Union Dead

  “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

  The old South Boston Aquarium stands

  in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

  The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

  The airy tanks are dry.

  Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

  my hand tingled

  to burst the bubbles

  drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

  My hand draws back. I often sigh still

  for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

  of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,

  I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

  fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

  yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunti
ng

  as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

  to gouge their underworld garage.

  Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

  sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

  A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

  braces the tingling Statehouse,

  shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

  and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

  on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,

  propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

  Two months after marching through Boston,

  half the regiment was dead;

  at the dedication,

  William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

  Their monument sticks like a fishbone

  in the city’s throat.

  Its Colonel is as lean

  as a compass-needle.

  He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

  a greyhound’s gentle tautness;

  he seems to wince at pleasure,

  and suffocate for privacy.

  He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,

  peculiar power to choose life and die—

  when he leads his black soldiers to death,

  he cannot bend his back.