Robert Lowell's Poetry

By

Dr. Matthew Hanson

2
Robert Lowells Poetry

Poetry makes nothing happen Auden said. But for Robert
Lowell poems were actions, event[s]...not the record of an event.
1

and did. In this essay, I mean to chart the form of a Lowell poem and
show you the things he does best. Let us begin.
It would be hard to make a list of Robert Lowells ten or twelve
best poems that would seem likely to any one too new to be true
Lowells best known poems are his best written. But here it is:
Dolphin, For the Union Dead, The Drinker, Skunk Hour,
Where the Rainbow Ends, The Death of the Sheriff, Mr.
Edwards and the Spider, The Drunken Fisherman, At the Indian
Killers Grave, Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid, Colloquy in
Black Rock, Between the Porch and Altar, In Memory of Arthur
Winslow, and The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.
Each Lowell poem is a fragment of an immense canvas to
read just one is to look in the dark with a candle at a painting that
goes on for rooms. The canvas itself is one in which commonplace
collides with history,
2
mythology, Christianity, and literature (to
Lowell, all are synchronous
3
), ruled over by the specters of Times
passage, Decay, and Death. Thoroughly a poet of New England, most
of Lowells poems happen in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New
York, or Maine. Lowells Charles River is an adumbration of the

1
Seamus Heaney: The Government of the Tongue (New York, 1988): 129.
2
Lowells favorite historical authors were (Norths) Plutarch, Thucydides, Tacitus, Clarendon, and
Toynbee. (Poetry 81 [Jan. 1953]: 269.)
3
Underlying this is the Augustinian idea that in Gods eyes all time is an eternal present. For further
illumination see Saint Augustines Confessions: Book XI, chapter 20.
3
Acheron; his Longfellow Bridge a parody of Gods covenant the
Rainbow;
4
his Public Garden is the Garden of Eden. In Lowells
world, Christ, Adam and Eve, Captain Ahab, Col. Robert Gould
Shaw, William James, Nantuckets Quakers, and all of Lowells
Relatives might conceivably meet on Boston Common to watch
yellow dinosaur steam shovels or storm the gold dome of the State
House with arrows, spears, muskets, or bombs.
In the beginning there is the Old Lowell, the Primeval Lowell.
Of his first book (from which much of his second, and most famous
book, was later taken) Lowell said:

[It] was written during the war, which was a
very different time from the Thirties. Then
violence, heroism, things like that, seemed
much more natural to life. They seemed
everyday matters and that governed my style.
Things seemed desperate. Even though our
cities werent bombed you felt they might be,
and we were destroying thousands of people.
The world seemed apocalyptic at that time,
and heroically so. I thought civilization was
going to break down....
5


What should I call this stage? St. Augustine and Mellville? Auden and
Washington Irvings spend Christmas on Nantucket? It is his blood and
guts; bowels, gulls, and skulls stage. The landscape of the early
poems is theological, peppered with religious imagery,
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and peopled

4
See Genesis 9:12-17.
5
Observer 21 July 1963: 22.
6
Lowell once said his early poems try to be poems and not a piece of artless religious
testimony...there is a question of whether my poems are religious or just use religious imagery. I
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by two basic types of characters. First, the Majority: blind to sin, they
are ensnarled in a web of voluptuousness, fornication, drunkenness,
ostentation, gluttony, greed, boasting, vanity, and envy that is the by-
product (or purpose) of our culture. Their spiritual world, the nobler
side of mans being, has been sold off, banned triumphantly, or
rejected all together. These are Lowells Quakers, Bostons serpents,
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Sextus Propertius, The Fat Man in The Mirror. On the wet end of
the plank: the Minority, the Prophets, the outcasts, the Exiles. They
see the Kingdom of Heaven as present in the world-as-we-know-it;
for them, the covenant is active, exists; to them the world is racking,
persistently sinful, and, whats worse they are generally powerless
to change it. They are helpless; yet an unshifting grip on a wisdom
that is their lonely own, to hope of salvation for both sinners and
themselves, makes them heroic. Their world is one where religion
and purity must give ground,/ little by little; but it does no good;
whose nuns are happy to pray/ for what lifes shrinkage leaves
from day to day. This is Mother Marie Threse and the speakers
in Where the Rainbow Ends and Colloquy in Black Rock. They
are tormented by the passage of Time which manifests itself in
Decay and Death
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in themselves and others in a way that the
Majority are not. In early books Land of Unlikness, Lord Wearys
Castle, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs Lowell is undiluted; here

havent any idea...what makes the earlier poems valuable seems to be some recording of
experience. (Robert Lowell, The Collected Prose of Robert Lowell (New York, 1987), p. 250)
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In Boston serpents whistle at the cold. (from Where the Rainbow Ends)
8
Often symbolically e.g., cancer is a crab in In Memory of Arthur Winslow; alcoholism a
whiskey bottle full of worms in The Drunken Fisherman.
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symbolism interested him more than science; the poems are
unbridled, lyric, and grotesque.

This Easter, Arthur Winslow, less than dead,
Your people set you up in Phillips House
To settle off your wrestling with the crab
The claws drop flesh upon your yachting blouse
Until longshoreman Charon come and stab
Through your adjusted bed
And crush the crab. On Boston Basin, shells
Hit water by the Union Boat Club wharf:
You ponder why the coxes squeakings dwarf
The resurrexit dominus of all the bells.
9


Stanzas are generally elaborate here lines two through five follow
an ABAB rhyme scheme, lines seven through ten ABBA, lines one
and six rhyme (the second stanza follows the same pattern; all end
rhymes are true rhymes) this poems entirety finds its beginnings
in the canzone, a repeating rhymed stanza which alternates
pentameter and six-syllable lines.
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Regularly rhymed stanzas keep us
in the poem where it is impenetrable; they give our minds a
reassuring concrete base to think from and return to. The metrics
are deliberate and formal like Donne, or Milton; sentence length is
varied; each lines first letter is capitalized: the style is, in a word,
traditional. There is a good deal of obscurity; until the poems final

9
From In Memory of Arthur Winslow.
10
With stanza length and rhyme scheme left to the poets discretion.
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line (Where the wide waters and their voyager are one) the
emphasis is on, and the emotion is in, the details following
William Carlos Williamss no ideas but in things. Like the
paintings of William Harnett, the poems deliberately concentrate on
parts of the experience rather than the whole. If not intellectually
expressible, bewildering miasmas of imagery are emotionally clear;
the poems are packed with piercing human feeling: they go into our
souls like swords, or razors. The poet is not in the poem, like
Whitman, but removed entirely: a lack which creates muscular,
rugged, and potent verse. That is, when guided detail by detail by a
detached speaker through an unmitigated experience, it becomes
more personally, and powerfully, our own. Our minds delight in
action; and in spatial correlations how one thing moves in relation
to another. Arthur Winslow is strengthened by kinesthesia (the
verbs: wrestling, drop (flesh), stab, crush, hit, dwarf); and its
connectives (in, upon, on, through, by) each detail is relative to at
least one other. In this stanza, for example, everything happens in
two sentences in two places Phillips House and Boston Basin:
Charon stabs Arthur Winslow inside of Phillips House, shells/ hit
water on Boston Basin; each sentence is connected to the other by
Arthur Winslow who hears (and ponders) the coxes squeakings. This
device compresses two times/places into a single event; its
unexpressed statements? the spinning world does not stop for death;
as one thing happens, so does another as you read this sentence
some one is born, dies, is married, or slits his wrists: this device is
Lowells mortar it gives his poems a laid-brick solidity. The device
works for the same reason roses and lion alone are not vivid, but a rose
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springing from a lions eye-socket is: spatial correlations animate images
and weld together seemingly incongruous details. Robert Frost once
called similar feats of association poetic prowesss essence. Without
kinesthesia images remain flat and two dimensional; without
connective spatial relationships the whole poem goes to pieces.
Without either the experience would be flat, dull, and forgotten by
tea time; with both the poem is strong, memorable, and vivid.
The strength, surprise, and sensitivity, in sound and metaphor,
in these poems, is bewilderingly good. It comes in part from the
structures: dramatic monologue, stream of consciousness, or
dream/allegory. They stab from the quotidian downward to the
inexpressible: they allow articulation of emotion and action on
different levels of meaning, give unmuzzled portrayals of inner
experience. A struggle that arises from a place beneath the conscious
is enacted in verse. On the surface the poems may seem to the reader
illogical, associational, and ungoverned by the author. But at the core,
meanings interlock like dove-tails and hit us like a two-by-four. Both
direct (with an I) and indirect forms (as in Arthur Winslow) are
used. The poetry is distant, sometimes difficult; at times it may be
vague, but it is never crude, and it is always powerful.
Throughout, we sense Lowell saw something, a thing so
spectacular, strictly personal, spiritual, and moving for him that he
used all means at his disposal to make us see it. Let me continue with
a poem that is one of Lowells least known, but one typical of his
early work, and one of his best; this poem is called The Drunken
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Fisherman.
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I suggest reading the poem through to get its feel, then
re-read with footnotes to grapple with biblical contexts. Each of the
five stanzas is eight lines long.

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
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I cast for fish that pleased my eye
13

(Truly Jehovahs bow
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suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends;
15

Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
16

Rose to my bait.
17
They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.
18



11
Jesuss words to Peter and Andrew: Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men (Mark
1:17). His words to Andrew do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men (Luke 5:10). Jesuss
parable: again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of
every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels and threw
away the bad. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the
righteous, and throw them into hell. (Matthew 13:47)
12
Gods acceptance of those who rebel and return is illustrated by the Prodigal son: So he went and joined
himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he began to be in want. And he would gladly have fed on
the pods that the swines ate; and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:15-16) Perhaps Isiah 66:17 Those
who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens following one in the midst, eating swines flesh
and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together. Or Do not give dogs what is holy; and do
not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and attack you. (Matthew 7:6) The
swine, because it parts the hoof and is cloven footed and does not chew the cud, is unclean to you.
(Leveticus 11:7)
13
See footnote 11.
14
People once thought the rainbow Gods weapon from which He shot arrows of lightning. God placed his
weapon in the heavens as a sign of His covenant. The covenant to which this line refers was made with
Noah, his descendants, and every living creature. Covenant is a complicated word; here it means Gods
promise not to destroy the Earth again with floods. (From the Oxford Annotated Bible)
15
Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he
will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.
16
See footnotes 11 & 14. Fish are also symbols of fertility.
17
Matthew 18:27 Go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open
its mouth you will find a shekel....
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Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old,
with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.
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A calendar to tell the day;
19

A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats;
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a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
21

A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks:
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are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?
23


Once fishing was a rabbits foot
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
24

Let suns stay in or suns step out:
25

Life danced a jig on the sperm-whales spout
26

The fishers fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience
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clean.

19
Matthew 6:34 Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let
the days own trouble be sufficient for the day.
20
Matthew 23:24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
21
Why not both arms? Matthew 5:30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it
away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
22
Isiah 62:10 I will greatly rejoice...for He has clothed me in the garments of salvation, has covered me
with the robe of righteousness. Bedroom slacks is ironic.
23
Isiah 66:24 And they shall go forth and look on the dead bodies of the men that have rebelled against
me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all
flesh. The imagery of fire and worms is derived from the rubbish dump at Gehenna....Gehenna is the
image of complete destruction, the extreme opposite of life. (Albert Nolan Jesus Before Christianity (New
York, 1989): 89) Also see Matthew 10:28; Mark 9:43-48.
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For behold, the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the stormwind, to render his anger in fury,
and his rebuke with flames of fire. (Isiah 66:15) Also, Matthew 24:12 And because wickedness is
multiplied, most mens love will grow cold.
25
See footnote 19.
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Matthew 16:2-4 When it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the
morning, It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the
appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation
seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah.
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Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river,
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ebbing, hauls
Its bloody water
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into holes;
A grain of sand
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inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and creation too;
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remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whales rage.
This is the pot-hole
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of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fishers sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter
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out.
34


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If anything protects society in our time, if anything can reform the criminal and make a new man out of
him, it is only the law of Christ, which manifests itself in the awareness of his own conscience. (Fyodor
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov Andrew H. MacAndrew trans. (New York, 1981): 74)
28
Behold, I will extend prosperity to her [Jerusalem] like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an
overflowing stream; and you shall suck, you shall be carried on her hip, and dandled on her knees. (Isiah
66:12)
29
Matthew 26:27 And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, Drink of
it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of
sins. Compare with footnote 14. (My boldface)
30
Matthew 18:20-21 He said to them, because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith
as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move; and
nothing will be impossible to you. (My boldface)
31
After the apocalypse, God will create anew: For as the new heavens and the new earth which I shall
make shall remain before me, says the Lord; so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new
moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me.... (Isiah
66:22-23) (My boldface)
32
Psalm 8: 14-15: Behold the wicked man conceives evil, and is pregnant with mischief, and brings forth
lies. He is making a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole which he has made.
33
A pun on St. Peter who denied Christ three times (twice to maids) and was forgiven. See Matthew
26:33-35; 59-75.
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I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term...
On water the Man-Fisher walks.
35


First of all the poem is simply there, a melancholic, bitter,
drunken fishing day, with the broken, magical motion of someone
thinking out loud; but our thoughts about it, what we are made to
think about it, is there too: it is made to be there. The poem operates
on (at least) three levels: sexual, religious, and quotidian. The first
and third are the most important, what effect us immediately,
physically; the second is less immediate, and intellectual. A short
discussion will show how extraordinarily much the poem does mean;
this discussion is not particularly imaginative the reader should be
able to account for each assertion in the words of the poem. The
description is dense; generalizations, profound.
The poem is structured a bit like Brownings Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister; it content is near Donnes The Bait; and its mood
like Wallace Stevenss The Dwarf

Now it is September and the web is woven.
The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,

34
When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he
finds none. (Matthew 12:43)
35
Matthew 14:22-32. Particularly verse 31: Jesus says O man of little faith, why did you doubt?
12
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,
That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

Neither as a mask nor as garment but as being,
Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibble
And coffee dribble...Frost is in the stubble.
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But Lowells poem is at once flatter, harder, and more personal. One
can go over The Drunken Fisherman again and again and get lost
in it; with each re-reading, its meaning becomes clearer and more
brutal. The one voices metrics tremble between straight tetrameters,
(A grain of sand inside my shoe) and lines of densely clustered stresses
(I will catch Christ with a greased worm); waver between observation,
anger, and sleaze. Spatial correlations again weld the poem together:
the trout are in the brook, then in the creel; the worms are in the

36
Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York, 1990): 152.
13
whiskey bottle; the bloody water in the holes. Never before has there
been such a powerful treatment of the theme of the isolation of man;
this is one fisherman alone one person but he represents us
all. The poem wrestles with, and finally accepts, the confusion, pain,
and wonder of mortal flesh; it recognizes mans most essential
limitation Mortality. Unlike Stevenss Dwarf, there is no
consolation of distance, or beauty. In the poem, Luck, Childhood,
weather, and youth are meaningless or have vanished; memory
(drools) and remorse (stinking) are sources of disgust; days are squares
on a calendar and not much more; self-pity (wallowing), rage, a
shadow of hope, and the exaggerated trials the slightest of things
become (that is what a grain of sand inside my shoe.... (and following)
means) is all thats left over.
Aging is inevitable; it is a process that will not halt for sleep,
sickness or for a drunkard. People are rotted by alcohol, the poem
says, but they will not give it up. As we age, we choose between
despair and novelty; health and illness; bitterness and happiness;
living in the present, or where the raging memory drools/ Over the glory
of past pools: aging is commensurable with us it is as ineludible as
breathing and death is our only escape. And yet Lowell doesnt
say so its the configuration of this highly structured poem, its
inescapable framework, that says it. It would be hard to find
anything more unpleasant to say about aging than the fourth stanza;
anything as saddening as the second; or any line as horrible,
defeated, or flatly inescapable than this is the pot-hole of old age. But all
is said with leveled symbolic ease; with something harder than
despair, more bitter and grudging it is something out of a broken,
14
drooling, grit-toothed mouth or the mind of old mad King Lear. And
isnt there something heroic about our isolation? our anger (once
called the only thing we take with us to the grave)? our habits and
worries that let us while our lives away without realizing it (or
realizing it which is almost worse)? and that we all will die our
deaths alone? The tone of the last stanza, or rather its careful quaver
between hope and resignation, allows for this too. The unfinished
sentence And when the Prince of Darkness stalks/ My bloodstream to its
Stygian term... melodramatic at first glance, means what the repetition
of nothing will go again in Mary Winslow means. That in the end,
nothing can, or will, bring back childhood or a life once it is
gone; what comes after is unknown, too horrible to discuss; and, at a
certain point, language fails. The rhetorical machinery (particularly
the second stanza, the first part of the fifth) makes us look closely at
ourselves; at the fear that plagues the hearts of all aging and elderly
that there is a grave, and not a pot of gold, at the end of the
Rainbow. The wit, depth, taste, and pathos in the face of our most
Essential Limitation is what makes The Drunken Fisherman so
good; its difficulty, its touching actual, and moral, wisdom makes it
one of the great poems of the language.
The New England life-view being Augustinian, Lowell
followed Pounds make it new and took it that everyone knew the
Bible to the point of wanting to see it, not in banal, but in fresh, terms.
References are personal
37
and drawing too much from them would be
like climbing down from a balloon without enough rope. Footnotes

37
See my boldface; footnote 6.
15
in the poems text tell from where the lines where cribbed, should
unmuddy the waters of theologic import. Biblical references place the
poem in the tradition of English religious poetry; but here references
are used obliquely. Christ was a moral Fisherman, a fisher of men, a
messenger of God. Lowells fisherman is drunk, randy, and money
mad; he carries a whiskey bottle; he thinks to find spiritual
enlightenment through fornication (I will catch Christ with a greased
worm). The language of the poem is sexual. (I have a comment: many
of Lowells characters walk about with steam pouring out their ears:
Lowells poems have several Bessemer furnaces full of Dylan
Thomas.) Lowells fisherman fishes not for all fish (men) but only for
those which please him: those which are attractive. The whale is a
sperm whale. This fisherman is a lecher: his catches (the context (they
are already caught) pushes this toward intercourse) are obscene (lewd,
morally repulsive), and fluent (flowing, liquid). Wet words in the
poem like drools,
38
sperm, and grease make fluents import sexual.
Hook means a fishhook, certainly, but a hook is also anything curved
or sharply bent like bow, it probably means a penis. A peter is
slang for a penis; Shallow waters peter out suggests spiritual, and
physical, impotency. Truly Jehovahs bow suspends/ No pots of gold to
weight its ends means Lowells fisherman is not Gods servant, but
Mammons. His creel, his purse, his treasure in heaven
39
is one
moths do destroy. He is anxious about tomorrow; worried about

38
Lowells translation of Baudelaires To the Reader also uses drooling sexually: Like the poor lush
who cannot satisfy,/ we try to force our sex with counterfeits,/ die drooling on the deliquescent tits,/
mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry. (Robert Lowell, Imitations (New York, 1990): 46)
39
See footnote 18.
16
gnats;
40
he lives a sort of death, or hell, in life. His faith is no dormant
mustard seed,
41
but a lifeless grain of sand. He doesnt regret, his
compassion is gone; hes bad tempered; for him, old age is a pit. The
final line On water the Man-Fisher walks means what the final
lines of Where the Rainbow Ends and Colloquy in Black Rock
mean: in the end, even those who seem irredeemable have a chance
for salvation, liberation, and faith. The use of religious texts to pound
home sexual points makes the poem memorable, striking, and spicy.
Robert Frost once said its not what you say so much as how
you say it; and how this poem says what it does, how it is made, is
nearly as interesting as what it says. Let me begin with a paragraph
or two on Lowells word choice a subject crucial to both late and
early work.
Words are plain, everyday words; items and actions he
describes are hard (often the hardest) and those of which human lives
consist. Lay readers can see, and feel, their way into at least one level
of each poem. Words confound, stretch, or hammer at the senses; we
are forced to feel and imagine staggering things. Verbs are active or
violent; nouns concrete, visual, musical; adjectives and possessives
set place like nouns, are temporal, expansive, active and few;
adverbs are sporadic to nonexistent. Verbs like suspends, rose, flopped,
corrupted, blow, danced, hauls, thrash, catch, and stalks are aural,
energetic: they make it simple and pleasurable to visualize action.
Verbs like wallowing and drool are strong because they come from our
regular description of something else a pig, and a child or invalid;

40
See footnote 20.
41
See footnote 30.
17
in context, both parallels are powerful and important. Verbs are
repeated to expand multiple meanings. Cast, for instance, is used
three times: twice as to throw (I cast for fish that pleased my eye; Is there
no way to cast my hook) and once as to search (the Fishers sons must cast
about). Words meanings work back and forth, over and through each
other; in later readings, they deepen and interchange, widening the
poems scope.
42

In all of his poems, Lowell had a predilection for adding
negative prefixes (mostly to verbs) to emphasize a poems negative
dramatic situation. Here it is used to stress the difficulty of aging.
Couch unstuffed with storm is concise, vivid, engaging. The couch (a
metaphoric reference to the speaker?) is first stuffed; to qualify as a
couch unstuffed, our imaginations rework the image to fit the sense
we make of the words. The device engages us directly we are
forced to tear apart the couch ourselves.
43
The device is quiet,
uncontrived, and (at times) perfect. It works (though to a lesser
degree) for the same reason that when I say dont think of a tiger
springing on you from the thicket you immediately think of just that
the mind must wrestle with what is negated.
Familiar nouns like pots, bait, creel, calendar, handkerchief, gnats,
bottle, slacks, belly, foot, and hook, appeal by virtue of being easily
recognizable, and visual. Nouns like trout; spout; water, pools, pot-hole,

42
Other examples of this technique. In and burial ground above the burlap mill;/ I see you swing a
string of yellow perch/ about your head and fan off the gnats that mill... (from The Mills of the
Kavanaughs) recognition of rime riche (here mill) is not instantaneous; but the quiet, uncontrived,
witty repetition makes us reconsider words meanings and visually welds the elements of the
experience together. Lines like the fabulous or fancied patriarch/ who sowed so ill for his
descent, beneath/ Kings Chapel in this underworld and dark create an illusion of depth by
repeating verbs that mean to go down, "under, or descend. (My boldface)
43
The bell-rope in Kings Chapel Tower unsnarls (from Mary Winslow) is another fine example
we first imaginatively snarl then unsnarl the bell-rope.
18
water, and brook appeal for similar reasons; also, they are parts of
other nouns in the poem. A trout is a species of fish; a spout is part of a
whale; water, pools, pot-holes, and brooks are all part of, or flow into, a
river. Worm is especially vivid and moving through its repetition in
adjacent lines; its use as a symbol of sex and hell. Moon is both a
noun
44
and verb; it means our natural satellite, to while away time in
idle reverie, and a month: its multiple contexts, definitions, give us
different ways to read the poem; tie it to words like wallowing,
phrases like a calendar to tell the day.
Lowells possessives and adjectives expand, vivify, or
temporize. Jehovahs, for example, expands the six-foot archers noun
bow into a rainbow; whales enlarges rage from alarming into
something truly terrifying. Blood-mouthed, bloody, and old are vivid in
themselves, and accrue additional visual and rhetorical force through
repetition. The strongest adjectives are nouns or verbs;
45
a word
wrenched into a syntactic position for which it is not intended can
electrify, strengthen, and supercharge a passage. There are five in this
poem: canvas, whiskey, bedroom, dynamited, and greased. Canvas creel is
vivid because first we imagine canvas itself as a ships sail, a bolt
of cloth then modify it into a creel; the effect is instantaneous,
purely seen and felt. Whiskey and bedroom make us ask questions like
is the fisherman an alcoholic? retired? an invalid? Dynamited
makes us ask...what sort of people fish with dynamite? in what sort

44
As world is used in William Blakes Auguries of Innocence: to wit To see a World in a Grain of
Sand.
45
Though here I illustrate it with adjectives, verbs also make strong nouns. For example: like mussels to
the dark/ chop of the shallows.... (from The Mills of the Kavanaughs).
19
of world does he live?
46
Jesus fished with nets; this fisherman, or his
neighbor, is a bastard. A greased worm is a rubber fishing bait rubbed
with Crisco; if worm does indeed mean penis here we should be
able to figure out why its is greased for ourselves. Verbs in the past
tense, used as adjectives, bury action or violence we feel the shock
of recognition and real experience with each. Verbs, nouns, and
adjectives are intentional, considerable, and appeal to one of the
senses; Lowells economical use of all three gives us poetry that is
weighty, vigorous, and conclusively well said.
There is a definite music to Lowells poetry. He made his
sentences sounds, and made those sounds distinctive. Lowell thought
dramatically: it extends even to the point of phonetics. We need only
read wallowing in this bloody sty; a whiskey bottle full of worms; life
danced a jig on a sperm-whale's spout; and a handkerchief to wave away/
The gnats; from this poem, or things like the red flag hammered in the
mast head; when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net; or as the
entangled screeching mainsheet clears/ the blocks from The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket to see, and hear, this. Lines sounds are
definitive; when blent with syntax, colloquial diction, and the tired
(The Drunken Fisherman) or violent (The Quaker Graveyard....)
tone and interwoven with meaning, much to our surprise, or horror,
we are dropped (rather, shoved) into the middle of the experience
or event.
47
The difference in the two poems tones rise from the
meanings of the words, but also, and I would argue more than in

46
See text of footnote 5.
47
See text of footnote 1.
20
part, from the letters themselves.
48
In that quoted from The Drunken
Fisherman, notice the profusion of the consonants l, s, f, m, p, h, (t,
and w in conjunction with h) and n. These are soft, breathy
consonants we say in our mouths fronts, with our lips or just the
tongues tip. In that quoted from the Quaker Graveyard, notice
most consonants are hard, things we say with our full tongues, in our
throats backs, with small explosions of breath: r, d, t, b, k, s, hard c,
g, sh and ch. But let us look closely at one phrase from each poem.
Wallowing in this bloody sty builds tension and tone by using both
types. It begins with the mushy w, l, n, and th sounds, then gives
three hard and explosive b, d, and t. The first three words roll around
in our mouths backs; bloody releases the built energy with the
explosive bs and ds tongue touches on the palate; stys t caps it is
a word of contempt we say as if spitting. Though not as vivid as a
whiskey bottle full of worms (there are no pigs in this sty), this is a line
used to a build tone, as many of Lowells first lines do. My favorite
line in all of Lowells poetry is the red flag hammered in the mast head.
Powerful in context,

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars cry 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.

48
This following is an admittedly rudimentary discussion. It may interest the reader to look at The Quaker
Graveyard In Nantuckets sixth section (Our Lady of Walsingham) to see how its softer tone (a stark
contrast to the rest) is created by using a greater percentage of low pitched vowels and softer consonants.
21

this line by itself is extraordinarily striking; notice how nearly all
hard consonants r, d, g, m, d, and t are clustered in it like bees
on a branch. The list itself grumbles. Hard consonants tend to gather
rhythmic stress; Lowell uses them to give heave to his beats
battering ram. Notice how all but in the and the latter half of
hammered is unstressed; red flag and mast head are fully stressed. Hard
consonants knot phrases together; here the beats hammer nails the
flag and mast head together. The hard d is repeated in red, head, and
hammered, m in hammered and mast, r in red and hammered.
Consanguineous consonants weld the line together neatly, cleanly,
and without seam;
49
and tie the nouns to verbs and vice versa: all
drag the reader into the sound, rhythm, and visual spectacle of a
sentence.
Only the blood mouthed rainbow trout/ rose to my bait, from The
Drunken Fisherman, illustrates Lowells witty, natural, and
ingenious assonance. Vowel sounds fit words lexical meanings. Here
they build from the back vowels o in only, blood-mouthed,
rainbow, trout, and rose to the slightly higher oo sound of to, to the
highest front vowel (ii) in my, and the final but slightly lower front
vowel a of bait. Rising tones support, further, and intensify the
image of a trout rising toward to the surface, taking the bait, and (I
would argue) ducking back under with the hook clamped in its
bloody mouth. The vowel arrangement gives us audial cues which
fill in blanks and complete the image. Back vowels often describe

49
This is prevalent everywhere: e.g., s and sh tie together the words of the line the chapels sharp-
shinned eagle shifts its hold (from Where the Rainbow Ends).
22
weight pots of gold; or create a feeling of gloom this is the pot-hole
of old age. The back and low vowels a, ah, and o of both phrases are
said far back in the throat, echo in our mouth, throat, and chest; they
are sonorous, booming, and weighty (as opposed to the front vowel
ee, for example, which is said, and echoes, in the mouth only).
Lowells assonance is apparently effortless. Its overall effect is
symphonic dominant tones float freely, disappear and reappear at
intervals; assonance creates a verse that is at once lyrical, easy to read
(in spite of often eye-crossing meanings and syntax), and visual. It
makes Lowell better than most, and greater than multitudes of poets.
Against stanzaic and discursive frameworks, a violence of
diction and syntax is brought to bear that gives the effect of a wrestle
to the death for the light of meaning: Lowells structures are efficient,
effective, and exacting. This establishes itself, on a small scale, in
sentence structure and punctuation. Here, both are seen easily in
stanza two. Punctuation is regular; and it is there for a reason. Semi-
colons in the first five-and-a-half lines suggest a close relationship
between what, at first, seem completely incongruous phrases; they
make us ask: what ties these together? The illogical list drives us to
read on to an answer. Semi-colons also make the statement briefer
and more forcible. Lowell makes heavy, and masterful, use of the
periodic sentence: a sentence that ends climactically with its most
important word. The colon after slacks tells us what follows is closely
related to what has just been said; but with regular syntax, what
usually follows a colon is a list. Stanza two stands on its head;
nervous and neural energy decreases considerably when we switch
what is after, with what is before, the colon. In other words, let the
23
stanza read, from its beginning: Are these fit terms/ to mete the
worm whose molten rage/ boils in the belly of old age:/ a calendar to
tell the day; a handkerchief to wave away.... and so forth. Colons
usually tie two clauses together, the second clause amplifying the
first; enormous rhetorical, energizing, eccentric force is gained when
a list comes first. Our mind is hurled forward to meanings
completion; our attention is held in (and by) suspense until an
answer is given. The fifth stanza is forceful for this reason. Shaped
similarly, it makes us draw conclusions from the things themselves,
makes us feel, and see, our way into the symbols which we may or
may not accept; but if we accept even one, the damage is done, and
the concluding this is the pot-hole of old age trembles like an arrow in
our hearts.
Comparing his couplets to those in Brownings The Last
Duchess, Lowell said of his early lines

[most are] run-on with...rhymes buried. Ive
always, when Ive used [the couplet], tried to
give the impression that I had as much
freedom in choosing the the rhyme as I had in
any of the other words. Yet they were almost
all true rhymes, and more than half the time
thered be a pause after the rhyme. I wanted
something as fluid as prose; you wouldnt
notice the form, yet looking back youd find
that great obstacles had been climbed.
50



50
The Collected Prose of Robert Lowell: 242
24
Lowell achieved this; yet most run on lines contain complete
thoughts, images, or actions; almost always have a verb and noun.
Between one lines end and the nexts beginning the just read line
expands: one thought piles itself atop of the previous. Take, for
example, the first two lines of The Drunken Fisherman: Wallowing
in this bloody sty/ I cast for fish that pleased my eye. The first line sets
action, relation (he is in, not out of, the sty) and place: the second line
a second action (cast) modifies or is commensurable with, the first
(wallowing); its noun (fish) qualifies the verb cast; it ends with a
qualifying phrase for fish (that pleased my eye). Both lines form
complete thoughts and could stand unpropped. This is poetic
sedimentation; building a poem with lines as masons build walls
with bricks; the strength and completeness of each line is a vital part
of what makes Lowells poetry so strong, so vivid, so good
throughout.
What can make a poem, or break it utterly, is where a poet
begins his lines, and where he ends them. Words at lines ends have
the most time to expand (though only for a seconds fraction, this is
an important way in which poems affect us) in the eye and mind of
the reader. Lowell put nouns, sounds, and color-words at line ends to
strengthen, electrify, and stagger us; he often put verbs at ends of
lines to steal energy, make passive, or give a sense of apathy. When
color is put at a lines end (as with the corpse was bloodless, a botch of red
and whites/ its open staring eyes (from The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket)), in the tenth of a second it takes to jump from one lines
end to the nexts beginning, colors (here red and white) become vivid
and expand in our eye and mind. Verbs are different animals: the
25
tenth of a second has its effect, it lets action expand; Im not sure how
to explain it adequately, but the effect is, deflating, like watching a
balloon whicker out of gas. Metaphors throng to me: a fish or a
porcelain bowl can get bluer and bluer; but there are only so many
ways for the fish to swim, or the bowl to shatter. A verb at a lines
end effects us like verb repetition: and the imagination delights, not
repetitively, but only once, in action. The lines a handkerchief to wave
away/ the gnats; now the hot river ebbing hauls/ its bloody water into holes;
and raging memory drools/ over the glory of past pools illustrate this.
Wave away is relatively passive to begin with; but wave aways
position makes us eager to go on to find out just what, exactly, is
being waved away. Verbs ending lines in Lowell are not fully
considered. In general this is because they lack a qualifying
connective noun the verbs exist in a vacuum, as it were. Hauls is
muscular, ss addition to its end makes it doubly powerful (notice,
when Lowell does use a verb at a lines end, that line almost always
enjambs with the next he steals some of the energy, but not all of
it); but again, we ask, hauls what? Drools is an exception. It gains its
edge from its double slant rhyme with hauls, and holes. Placed at
the lines end, it is even more powerful: it expands itself into one long
disgusting string of slobber. If you doubt, consider how much more
force wave away and hauls would have if, instead of ending lines, they
began them. It would, I think you will find, dramatically change their
tenor. Notice how strong the first cast; rose, corrupted, pouching, boils,
mimics, and stinking are. These verbs begin lines. Their strength both
visual and physical is also due to their use in conjunction with nouns.
Color swells in the mind and eye to a considerable degree when
26
placed at the end of a line: Lowell put nouns at lines ends for the
same reason. Verbs begin lines immediately following and force us to
mobilize the noun, as with the rainbow trout/ rose; molten rage/ boils; a
grain of sand inside my shoe/ mimics; remorse/ stinking; and so on. Strong
verbs at lines beginnings claw and hammer our senses: they make us
pay attention. In Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid; if you count, you
will find the proportion of verbs at lines beginnings is nearly two to
one over verbs in lines middles or at lines ends. These devices are
typical Lowell; they make his lines active -- vigorous, visual,
surprising -- and without doubt make his poems incredibly exciting
to read.
Lowells most profound gift: he is able to sustain energy and
release it in a final line. On water the Man-Fisher walks. The syntax is
Latin: when we read it as the Man-Fisher walks on water it makes
more sense. Notice that the miracle here Jesus walking on water
is itself an action. And stalks my bloodstream to its Stygian term... the
line just before is the poems point of most extreme and hopeless
closure: until, and through, this line we are given the sustained
perplexity of a tortured human soul. The rhetorical quality, the use of
a classical reference (Stygian) in a poem primarily based on Biblical
passages, gives the sense of unresolved emotional, and spiritual,
confusion; which the ellipsis then dramatizes. The last line makes the
poem dialectic: unlike any other line, it is an antithesis, a paradox; it
creates a moment of revelation, a renewal of faith, a cleansing, a
release, a moment of ecstasy. Christs walking on water is a moment
of synthesis, of higher truth, and faith. The poem ties and unties a
spiritual Gordian knot; the final line cleaves it. The oblique message
27
is ye who endure to the end will be saved; our reward for wrestling
with such feelings is self-discovery: whether we realize this or not,
we feel it in our bones. Recall that a periodic sentence is one that ends
with its most important word. Lowells poems are periodic: they end
with the most important line. With dramatic action being what it is in
Lowell, the final line is the powerful, and essential, climax of each
poem.
51

Lowell a rarity among poets, one who is able to borrow a
phrase from T.S. Eliot to create the object they contemplate. To
my mind, Lowell did what no one had ever thought, nor had the
ability, to do and he did it better. It has not since been duplicated.
The poems are parable-like; concerned with initiation the reader
wrestles with meaning as the poet wrestled with words toward a
union with God. Depth and depth of craftsmanship are equal. The
craft is difficult, at times, to see, but it is there: Ive flown you over a
tornado. And yet, it was not sufficient to take you through the
mechanisms, or even the colors of the vowels, because in a Lowell
poem everything counts in every way the same as it does in an
action.
Lowells poems are some of the finest in the language. They
change us, and the change they make is that which real art demands:
a change which we accept thankfully, and will not regret.
* * *
Paging through Land of Unlikeness, Lord Wearys Castle, and The
Mills of the Kavanaughs, we notice words are violent; stiff; rhetorical;

51
Often with a flash of visual density: My mothers hollow sockets fill with tears (from Mother Marie
Threse); or through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom (from At the Indian Killers Grave).
28
or visually sharp. Words like baby, heart, fish, cows --ostensibly calm
words -- are used with words like hang, gutted, drool, sick, hammer,
hack, and worms. The overall effect of juxtaposition of terms such as
these is kinesthetic, at times sickening,
52
but furthers the sense of a
struggling soul at war with itself. Arguably it is overdone, but then,
do we blame the vaulter for overshooting his pole? The reader may
want to compare these words with those that occur most frequently
in Lowells late poetry: in those books following (and including) the
publication of Life Studies in 1956. Many of the same words used in
early poems recur in the late: words like serpent, net, fish,
drunkenness, moon, razor, cows, windows, search, and so on. This
list is by no means inclusive. There are other correlations: along with
certain words, Lowell dragged some early poems technical
tendencies into the late. The later style is more passive and adjectival.
Early poems happen mostly at night or at evening; later poems
continue this; but mornings and afternoons are more common.
Lowells birds are still birds of paradise; his rivers still the rivers of
life and imagination; his fish and sea creatures still women.
53
In
later poems, Lowell no longer capitalizes each lines first letter: not
immediately felt, this does create a difference in authoritative degree
at lines beginnings it is the difference between stop and Stop.
In later poems, Lowell became a vivisectionist of self; unraveled a
tangled skein of people, places, and things inextricably tied together
by his personal experience. To my mind, the later poems can be
divided into two sections: the poems in Life Studies and everything

52
C.f., ...watermelons gutted to the crust (from Colloquy in Black Rock).
53
Often ostensibly: see sonnet #4 of Mermaid.
29
that came after. The movement, in a general sense, is toward a more
personal and sublime style: one that moved away from Miltonic
literary poems with each line needing half a page of footnotes to
explicate, to one much simpler, much closer to actual thought and
speech. He makes us feel the late poems were as much a challenge to
his courage and feelings to write as they are a challenge to our
own to read. He no longer resorts to melodrama, or bombastic
rhetoric; but rather pummels us with blank, flat, sledgehammer
statement.
54

The most brutal, horrible, and affecting poem in Life Studies is
called Skunk Hour: it will serve as middle ground between a
discussion of Lowells early and fully matured style. Notice that,
though the literary allusions in the poem subsist, Lowell does reach
for (and gets) a rather elevated personal style. Instead of writing in
strict, fettering, metrical measures, the free verse lines are written in
sentences. The gentled discourse makes the poem more poignant; the
early poems are made things, like tapestries -- this poem is grounded
in personal experience. As do many of the poems in Life Studies, it
bears the unmistakable brand Ive been there. Still there is the
struggling movement of a spirit, looking for...something, but the
overtone is no longer frenzied; Skunk Hours tone is indifferent at
first, it later then explodes in our face.
55
Skunk Hour owes a great
deal of its action and construction, particularly the drifting

54
See the corpse (Sailing Home From Rapollo); a line to itself, it makes us feel the inescapability, and
blank finality, of death.
55
Beginning with the line One dark night. (Stanza five)
30
description of the first four stanzas, to the poet to whom it is
dedicated, Elizabeth Bishop. Each of eight stanzas is six lines long.

Nautilus Islands hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her sons a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
shes in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victorias century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The seasons ill
Weve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox-stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnets filled with orange cork,
31
orange his cobblers bench and awl;
theres no money in his work,
hed rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hills skull;
I watched for love cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My minds not right.

A car radio bleats,
Love, O careless Love.... I hear
my ill spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat....
I myself am hell;
nobodys here

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up main street:
white stripes, moon-struck 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
32
a mother skunk and 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.

Landscapes in Life Studies remain theological; sheep, the hermit
heiress, fishnet, and hills skull illumine. Elaborate craftsmanship,
though muted, persists: each stanza has six lines; stanzas three, six,
and eight (ABCACB); four and five (ABCBCA) have identical rhyme
schemes; twos and sevens first three lines follow identical schemes
(ABB) then diverge; the first stanzas first three lines follow the first
three lines of stanzas three, six, and eight (ABC), then it also diverges.
Free verse lines, slant rhyme, the interlocking yet unobtrusive rhyme
scheme, makes the verse varied, lyrical, and visually dense. Rhyme is
not willful, mannered, or rhetorical, but conventional -- and used to
drive home points. The poem has a ballads structure: each stanza
fleshes out one focal point, one dramatic (in this poem mostly
passive) action. The general movement is from general to specific
description to reflection, then back to specifics the skunks. The
understated ending is like that of a Greek tragedy. The first four,
seemingly throw-away, stanzas are winter, summer, fall, and,
obliquely (stanza two), spring near Nautilus Island; the second four
show characters (I and the skunks) in action. Stanza one and two
enclose the heiress, her actions, her family; the third the summer
millionaire; fourth the decorator; the fifth and sixth the I; the
seventh the skunks; the eighth stanza knots the I and the skunks
33
together. In the same way colors sharpen in our minds at lines ends,
stanza breaks here allow us to flesh out blocks of description: there is
only so much detail our minds can absorb at one time; stanza breaks
here are to give us time to pause, consider, mull over the details
catalogued in the stanzas, and what importance, if any, the details
have. This makes the poem alive in every line, touching, and
pleasurable to speak aloud or read. In the first four stanzas of drifting
description, no verbs begin lines; those that do are passive (is) or
have a qualifier before them (shes in; weve lost; decorator brightens;
hed rather; I watched; they marched; I stand; and she jabs). Scarcity of
enjambed verbs hightens apathy and mutes the poems energy. (I
have a comment: this technique is like smothering a grenade with
your body the poems passivity makes its subject (madness)
somehow more horrible.) Dissipated colloquial syntax; contractions;
words which continue to be hard, lyric, alliterative; and metrics
which are less forced, give us the effect of real, and human, (hence
endearing) speech. Robert Frost once wrote A sentence is a sound in
itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. The
sentence sounds are very definite entities...as definite as words...(and)
are apprehended by the ear.... The most original writer only catches
them from talk, there they grow spontaneously.
56
Lowell is
surprisingly original.
This is a rudimentary discussion of what is a very complex
poem: here it serves only as a point of departure for other discussions

56
Robert Frost, The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Lawrence Thompson, ed. (New York, 1964) 110.
34
of those technical signatures which disappear, and those which
remain, through Lowells poetic development.
One of Lowells best and most famous poems is Dolphin. It is
the culmination of a mature style. It is also frightfully difficult. The
free verse meter searched for in Skunk Hour -- not reminiscent of
any other free verse meter I have read -- is culminated in this poem.
The personal, sublime, style, struggled for in the sonnets of
Notebook, and History, is here achieved. The symbols are rooted in
Lowells life -- not in literature. Even Racine and Phdre seem present
to add personal, not literary, weight.
57
I have chosen Dolphin
because it makes, or should make, brutally clear that the way that I
read The Drunken Fisherman is the only way Lowells poems can
be, or should be, read.

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangmans not of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will....
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

57
Lowell translated Racines Phdre in 1961. Here Phdre seems like Helen in W.B. Yeats No Second
Troy. In Yeats poem, Helen is used to tie his lifes love, Maude Gonne, to a character of great historic, and
literary, beauty. In Lowells poem, I would suggest he does the same for Lady Caroline: by comparison
with Phdre, Lady Caroline is rendered beautiful and immortal in one stroke.
35
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself
to ask compassion...this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

I do not understand all of it, but what I do understand I love,
and what I dont understand I love almost more. My dolphin, you only
guide me by surprise. Dolphin was Lowells love term for his third
wife Lady Caroline Gordon; the poem itself is an address, a note of
thanks, and a plea for forgiveness. You only guide me by surprise
seems to me a statement about how all our loved ones surprise us
with affection, kindness, and love -- even when we may not think
ourselves deserving. When I was troubled in mind is brilliantly
understated: Lowell suffered from the horrific (both to himself and
those around him), cyclonic, fits of the manic-depressive for most of
his life. You made for my body/ caught in its hangmans knot of sinking
lines,
58
/ the glassy bowing and scraping of my will.... The article is not
clear: made what? Made for here means to go to the dolphin is
swimming (or swam) toward a drowning, helpless, sailor (see
footnote). These lines are almost impenetrably, and personally,
symbolic; they do create a tone of desperation, mysteriousness (of

58
Recall the image of the drowned sailor in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket; to wit, 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. These lines of Dolphin restate the myth of
Palaemon who was drowned near Corinth; dolphins are honored by sailors as sailing mens protectors. This
passage is also reminiscent of Miltons O ye Dolphins, waft the helpless youth. (from Lycidas) The
speaker of Dolphin is still in the act of sinking: is yet within the Dolphins reach.
36
someone fascinatingly in love?) -- humans cant breathe underwater
like fish -- for some reason, only this Dolphin can, or wants to, save
him. The ellipsis at the end dramatizes the action: we dont know if
the dolphin arrives in time or not. Will is the Puritan source of
sensibility. I have sat and listened to too many/ words of the collaborating
muse. Collaborating can mean helpful, but it can also mean
treacherous, inclined to betray. Perhaps the muse, Lowells poetry, is
responsible for his drowning (whatever that may mean -- madness,
sadness, suicide: we just dont know). The lines not avoiding injury to
others,/ not avoiding injury to myself--/ to ask compassion... are brutally
human, torn through with feeling. As we get older, we see the
damage that we do to others; but we also see the recompense of joy
that the damage brings to us. I think that is what these lines mean: in
marrying Lady Caroline, Lowell threw away a marriage of twenty-
five years with Elizabeth Hardwick. Lady Caroline, the Dolphin, is
his saving grace, the recompense of joy she brings keeps him from
sinking beneath the waters of sadness, life, or madness. These lines
quaver with doubt: maybe I should, maybe I shouldnt have.
Notice he asks for compassion (helpful, merciful), not pity (to feel
sorry for). When we read the lines this book, half fiction,/ an eelnet made
by man for the eel fighting, and think back to early poems,
remembering an eel is a long snakelike marine fish,
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we see the New
England language of fishing, the imagery of the Grail legend, the

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Eel is used obliquely in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: to wit blast the eelgrass about a
waterclock/ of bilge and backwash....
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Fisher-King of Eliots The Waste Land reasserted and changed.
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Unlike The Drunken Fisherman, who is drunk, randy, money mad,
and angry; Dolphins fisherman is passive, fate accepted.
The words of this poem, as did the individual words and
phrases of The Drunken Fisherman, deserve our full attention.
Verbs in the first half of the poem are quiet, self-effacing; they require
other people, companions, or agents: guide, captive, drawn, (you) made,
bowing, scraping, listened. The verbs of the latter half are active: plotted,
ask, made, and did. Obliquely, the passive first and more active second
half of the poem give us the wrestle to the death for the light of
meaning I mentioned earlier: here the wrestling is naked what is
emotionally clear in The Drunken Fisherman is so, here, verbally.
In a general way Lowells mature style follows Wallace Stevenss
Make it Abstract: the words are airy -- rooted in, not outside of, the
mind. The poem is still an event, an action, but the landscape is not
Boston Common, a river, or Maine, but rather the inside of Mr.
Lowells head a landscape comprised of his experience, prejudices,
and strikingly personal images. Places are replaced by people
writers, their texts, his wife, and dislocated imagery.
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We would
expect a Lowell line with glassy, bowing, and scraping to read
something like the Glass Fisher bowed and scraped (then smashed)
his skull along the graves; in Dolphin, the words are used

60
See footnote 11. Notice the fishing imagery of The Drunken Fisherman corresponds to the decorators
fishnet filled with orange cork in the fourth stanza of Skunk Hour; how net or cast or catch is
repeated in this (eelnet), and in many, many other Lowell poems.
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The overall effect of dislocated images is disturbing in the poem; but if we read through the body of
Lowells work we see that these are not simply dislocated, but rather are images that were carefully
developed, nourished, grown, reworked, and reused. Though seemingly incongruous, these details dovetail
Dolphin with many other poems. Compare the images and tone of this poem to Fishnet, The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket, and dozens of others to see what I mean.
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passively: the glassy and bowing and scraping of my will. The use of the
word will makes the line psychological; lack of other concrete nouns
make the line doubly so. If we look at the nouns of the poem, man,
maze, composition, voice, Phdre, body, knot, will, words, will, muse, life,
injury, compassion, book, fiction, eelnet, man, eel, eyes, and hand only
knot, book, eel, net, eyes, and hand create any sort of image in the
eye and mind. Unlike the details in Arthur Winslow and The
Drunken Fisherman, details seem unconnected: we must, instead of
being able to delineate ties between images, take it on faith
connections are there. Of the adjectives iron, incomparable, wandering,
hangmans, sinking, glassy, (too) many, collaborating, (too) freely, and half,
only iron, hangmans, sinking, and glassy are visual or liven images;
only hangmans (to line), iron (to maze), and sinking (to lines) refer to
solid, titillating, visual nouns. The overall effect of the words, their
contexts, is, at worst, deeply moving, at best, heart rending.
Like Skunk Hour, and for the same reasons, the language is
colloquial, giving the familiarity of thoughts or thought processes.
There are weak places in the poem, I feel, but I am unable to pinpoint
them because Dolphin is a whole greater and more touching than
the sum of its worst and best parts. Images of hard things -- glass,
mirrors, iron, knots; the negatives; the passive verbs: all are still
signs, or signals, of internal weather. It is a poem about Lowells
fears, his love, his regret, and finally his resignation to what his life
has become, what it will be, and what it has been. The cumulative
effect is a sense of sadness, powerlessness: it is hard to find words
good enough for it. This poem is full of personal truth: what is said is
not often said in words, much less in poems. What is unexpressed is
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almost more touching. The details, instead of being hammered into
our heads like nails through enjambments, syntax, and diction
are allowed to develop their own accents. Extended use of dash and
ellipsis (....) is made to dramatize Lowells (and our own) fear of
going, sometimes inability to go, beyond a certain level of
psychological pain here they are so effective because he dives, or
gives the illusion of diving, far deeper than most of us ever will, or
could. The dash, like the ellipsis, welds elements of the poem
together (it ties myself to fighting) while giving the sense of the
quickness of, and the abrupt breaks in, human thought. In the final
line my eyes have seen what my hand did the syntax again is Latin: my
hand did what my eyes have seen is another way it could be read.
The way it is written is more powerful. It gives us the Greek and
Roman way of thinking of literary authorship that it is gods (or
God's) gift, as inescapable as breathing...or your own hand. It creates
a certain horror in us because the image is, ostensibly, as if the hand
has, somewhere between the fingers and wrist, a brain of its own.
The eyes, meaning the human brain theyre connected to, are
powerless to stop what that hand is doing. As our habits, worries,
angers, and fears often keep us from stopping what our hands do.
This is as far as I could go with Dolphin: it is an
incredibly rewarding, but brutally difficult poem to work with. What
ties the elements of this paper together. The symbol of the Fisher-
King: it is one of the most important literary symbols of the twentieth
century -- nearly every poet of stature has written of it.
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We owe

62
See W.B. Yeats The Fisherman for a shockingly close example.
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much to Robert Lowell, for renewing the legend; and for allowing us,
through his poems, if only for a moment, to remember what the
rigors of our world take from us.