VERSE
Lowell, Robert
dead.": "Alfred Coming Clark," For the Union Dead) that opens to the common mystery, the ultimate poet's question: . . . . But tell me,/Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?'" ("Randall Jarrell,"...
...Commonweal, Oct_9 11, 1946 9 December 1977:786...
...It becomes in fact part of Lowell's grim bond with his fellow poets and the source of a wry recapitulation of his career: Ah the swift vanishing of my older generation~the deaths, suicide, madness of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell, 'the last the most discouraging of all surviving to dissipate Lord Weary's Castle and nine subsequent useful poems in the seedy grandiloquence of Notebook...
...Santa in red Is crowned with wizened berries...
...Even though his poetry virtually embalms him before our eyes, Lowell is not averse to gallows humor...
...Twenty years ago I hung my stocking on the tree, and hell's Serpent entwined the apple in the toe To sting the child with knowledge...
...Raise us, Mother, we fell down Here hugger-mugger in the jellied fire: Our sacred earth in our day was our curse...
...unmarried man and powder-puppet, Witness to the Devil...
...Now storm-clouds shelter Christmas, once again Mars meets his fruitless star with open arms His heavy saber flashes with the rime, The war-god's bronzed and empty forehead forms Anonymous machinery from raw men...
...Pray For us whom the blockbusters married and buried...
...The cannon on the Common cannot stun The blundering butcher as he rides on Time-The barrel clinks with holly...
...Our Mother, shall we rise on Mary's day In Maryland, wherever corpses married Under the rubble, bundled together...
...Shall I hear, (O Mary...
...Not crown of thorns, not ixon, not Lombard crown, Not grilled a~d spindle spires pointing to heaven Could save us...
...Mary, hear O Mary, marry earth, sea, air and fire...
...Once I came from Mass...
...In "Reading Myself" (Notebook 196768) Lowell shifts the metaphor of his work as honeycomb---"circle to circle, cell to cell,/the wax and honey of a mausoleum"--through that last image to the analogy, "this open b o o k . . , my open coffin...
...Last Night," History) Consistently through Lowell's corpus death supplies a~haunting keynote: Fifty-one years, how many millions gone--_9 . . hear it, hear the clopping of the hundreds of horses unstopping . . . each ROBERT LOWELL The Commonweal Poems THE DEAD IN EUROPE After the planes unloaded, we fell down Buried together, unmarried men and women...
...When Satan scatters us on Rising-day, O Mother, snatch our bodies from the fire: Our sacred earth in our day was our curse...
...During a Transatlantic Call," The Dolphin) Yet even while chronicling his own aging in his CllRlSTMAS EVE UNDER BOOKER'S STATUE Tonight a blackout...
...sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle...
...His stocking is full of stones...
...Heine Dying in Paris, I: Death and Morphine," Imitations) Impossible miracle for the child already born into life's continuum, prey to its inevitable changes: "They say fear of death is a child's remembrance/of the first desertion...
...Our sacred earth in our day is our curse...
...Commonweal, July 12, 1946 hauls a c o f f i n . ("Half a Century Gone, 5" Notebook) And at an extreme death grows to an embodiment of the poet's work...
...In its bed The ancient speckled serpent will appear, And black-eyed susan with her frizzled head_9 When Chancellorsville mowed down the volunteer, "All wars are boyish," Herman Melville said...
...Hooker's heels Kicking at nothing in the shifting snow, A cannon and a cairn of cannon balls Rusting before the blackened Statehouse, know How the long horn of plenty broke like glass In Hooker's gauntlets...
...I am cold: I ask for bread, my father gives me mould...
...Why do we die?'" ("Randall Jarrell," History...
...Mother, my bones are trembling and I hear The earth's reverberations and the trumpet Bleating into my shambles...
...But we are old, our fields are running wild: Till Christ again turn wanderer and child...
...Or is this the undertone of an unearthl~ wish...
...Man of war, Where is the summer's garden...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
