Robert Lowell
It's interesting that while on the west coast and different parts of the
country you see the immigrant experience going strong, people coming to
America and dealing that old culture, Lowell is dealing with a culture
that we have been studying since the first day of class. That is, the old
Puritans. As much as we are a melting pot of all these other cultures this
puritan shadow still falls upon us, it still has an impact today. So it
hasn't gone away. Especially in Boston. He is from a patrician family,
the Lowells. He's related to Amy Lowell, whom we studied earlier.
These leading Protestant families were called the Boston Brahmans, like
the upper class of people in India, and of course they look down upon everyone
else (another old Puritan habit). They especially looked down on these
new-coming Irish immigrants with their Catholicism and their different
cultural ways. And here they are with their roots in England, some of them
even talk with an English accent (Have you ever heard Bill Buckley speak?).
Robert does two things that really split him off from his family. He
has a generational problem, if not a cultural problem.
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He converts to Roman Catholicism. This was the religion of the rabble.
Proper Boston families were congregationalists, unitarians, all these other
descendants of the old protestant main line churches, presbyterians. And
here he becomes a Roman Catholic.
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Then also he was a conscience objector in World War II. So, he's a bit
separated from his family and his background, but never the less has to
deal with it.
"Mr. Edwards and the Spider"
And we get to that right off the bat with 'Mr. Edwards and the Spider'.
Which Mr. Edwards are we talking about? Jonathan Edwards. Why does the
leaf fall in the woods? A message from God, remember? Mr. Edwards, I don't
know if we mentioned this at the time, died at a relatively young age as
a result of the small pox vaccine. Now here is a guy, who represents the
previous era, being killed by science. He would have done better to just
trust in God to get him through the small pox. His famous sermon, what
was his famous sermon? 'Sinners in the hands of an angry God.' And of course
this spider here comes from that sermon. The idea of the spider dangling
over the fire the same way god dangles us over the fires of hell, that
at any moment the string may snap.
I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day.
Now how do spiders do this? They spin these little webs out, what do they
call those webs? Have you heard the term gossamer? Gossamer
is the web the spiders spin so they can fly through the sky. Kind of like
a kite, it lets the spider float through the air.
The web goes up into the air and the wind catches it and carries it
off into the air. And also like a kite the tail helps to keep it from going
to high, the tail of the kite weighs it down as well. So he sees
the spiders . . . .
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
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 the sunrise and the sea;
So what happens to these spider when the wind is westerly? Ok, which was
does a west wind blow from? It blows to the east from the west. What coast
does Mr. Lowell live on? The east coast. And so if the wind is blowing
east, it is blowing out to the Atlantic Ocean. So what is going to happen
to these spiders? They are going to die. Like Mr. Edwards' spider. Here
is this great desire to get from tree to tree to start up a new generation.
But instead the wind blows them out to sea and they die.
Among the many remarkable traits of spiders, none has excited greater
interest nor produced more fantastic speculation than that of `ballooning'.
The ancients were familiar with some of the phenomena attending the flight
of spiders, for Aristotle believed that spiders could shoot out their threads,
and Pliny wrote: `In the year that L. Paulus and C. Marcellus were consuls,
it rained wool.' Often during the late summer and autumn months on quiet,
hazy days, the air is filled with shining strands and threads of gossamer,
the silk produced by the spiders that have attempted to fly and failed.
Sometimes one sees a field or meadow carpeted with silk and a host of little
spiderlings spreading their lines in vain attempts to fly. On the other
hand many are successful-
Darwin, in 1839, recorded the arrival on H.M.S. Beagle
of `vast numbers of a small spider, about one-tenth of an inch in length,
and of a dusky red colour's when the ship was sixty miles from the coast
of South America-and ballooning is without doubt an important factor in
the distribution of many species all over the world. Nor is it confined
to any particular season. The prosaic translate `gossamer' as `goose summer'
in reference to the fanciful resemblance of the fragile skeins of silk
to the down of geese which fly about when one renovates feather beds and
pillows; but gossamer translated as `God's summer' refers to the legend
that this gossamer is the remnant of Our Lady's winding sheet which fell
away in these lightest fragments as she was assumed into heaven." |
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?'”
Isn't this great stuff? Magee asks after finishing a rather exceptional
piece from Lowell.
'What are we in the hands of the great God?'
This is of course goes back to the angry God, and God is mad. He is upset
with us because we are sinful. And all of our defenses are like thorns,
they can keep out a human enemy, but what about the fire? They can't stop
a fire, in fact they help it because they just become part of the fire,
they fuel the fire. Our defenses only add to our destruction. We have a
sickness past your cure. Well who can cure your sickness? This is classic
Calvinism. It is beyond our cure, who can cure it? God. Yes, Gods grace.
But we don't have a lot of grace when we are focusing on gods anger. So
what are we going to do to resist god? How will the hands be strong? How
will the heart be endure? What are we going to do against and angry god?
'A very little thing, a little worm.'
We are all vile worms. Have we talked about this saying before? The
puritans love this saying. I don't know how we missed it? It's a way of
saying we are all sinful. There you have it, that's the way they looked
at us and at nature. The things they find in nature to compare us to are
the things we find the most repulsive. Worms, spiders, do you want to be
a worm? Do you like worms? Do you like spiders? I don't think so. It generally
draws up an image that is negative. Something that we are afraid of, something
repulsive. They are comparisons. The classic puritan comparison is to compare
us to something repulsive. To say that God finds us even 10 thousand times
more repulsive then we find that worm or spider. So we are a little worm.
Then he goes on to say . . .
A very little thing, a little worm,
Or an hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
So they can have a big impact.
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up this mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority?'
Where is your authority once you are dead?
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 the fierce
fire:
So he was killing spiders; he kind of removes himself from it. It ones
of the marks of Puritans, at the moment they are parading you through the
street and whipping you and lopping of ears and noses, they tend to say
it is God doing it. They think they are just the hand of God, that this
is really God's action. So I saw the spider die but I did not kill the
spider. But when you throw a spider into a fire it dies.
There's no 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 and abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
Have you ever put a bug on a brick by a fire or on an old Franklin stove
top and watch it sizzle up? That is how we are when we are put into Hell.
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-
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.
There is a big theological debate about the nature of Hell. About what
is behind this stanza. That is, is Hell ever-lasting? Are you destroyed
in a moment of terrible anguish and pain but then you cease to exist? Does
the soul blink out of existence? Either way the suffering is infinite.
If you measure it with an hourglass, by the sands of time thing, will it
be ten minutes or a trillion years. Either way it is infinite. 'To die
and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.' All of a sudden we are no
longer the vile spider, but we are being bitten by the black widow of death.
He has shifted his image a death, but true death is to die and know it.
'Memories of West Street and Lepke'
Because he was a conscientious objector, Lowell spent a year in jail, New
York's West Street jail. Lepke Burkhalter, a member of Murder Inc., was
there as well.
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is a "young Republican,"
So even the bums are rich where I am living now. Teaching only on Tuesdays
wearing pj's, and reading books all day, must be a pretty good life. Must
be an English Professor.
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo
infants' wear.
So she is quite brightly colored in her pj's as well. But this is now,
what about back then?
'There are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and the president, and
then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
These are not people he is used to being around. Not the type at all. He
remembers back to when he was in jail.
Given a year.
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail,
a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pumps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and
blue.
So, don't mess with them or come between them and their steaks.
I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Why? Well, he's form this Boston upper class, and those types were not
upper class.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
No, he answered, "I'm a JW."
So what about JW? They are pacifists, they don't pledge allegiance to a
to a secular fallen worldly government. They are very much separation of
church and state. Above and beyond most people.
'He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell
full
of things forbidden the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter
palm.
So why does he get special treatment? Why does he have stuff no one else
has? He's got connections, he is part of the Mob.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
-
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. . . .
Skunk Hour
Robert Lowell
For Elizabeth Bishop
'Skunk Hour' for Elizabeth Bishop. They point out that this is a response
to Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Armadillo.'
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her
Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she’s in her dotage.
So she's got all these connections, but she is getting old.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
Imagine living on Darbone and buying up all the camps on the other side?
That's pretty much money is it not?
The season’s ill--
we’ve 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.
So, there is some mad economics going on right now. The millionaire is
gone, they didn't say he was broke.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,
I watched for love-cars.
Now what are love cars? What does he mean by that? You all know this. Cars
with people making out in them.
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned
down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. .
. .
My mind’s 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,
This is of course from Milton's 'Paradise Lost' where the devil is carrying
around hell with him as he travels out of hell. He can't leave it behind.
He is upset that he can't have any fun while others do.
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here--
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march 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.
They are not going to be run off when there is food to be had.
The class takes a break at this point.
For the Union Dead
Robert Lowell
“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”
'For the Union Dead.
Relinquunt Omia Servare Rem Publicam.' (They left all to serve
the republic.)This is what is on the memorial in Boston across from the
Massachusetts State House.
This memorial is in dedication of the first all black regiment in the
United States history, the 54th Massachusetts regiment. They led a charge
against Fort Wagner in South Carolina. They all died. Does this sound familiar?
Yes, the movie Glory was based on this regiment and their CO Robert
Gould Shaw who the South had buried with the troops to disgrace him.
But Robert Lowell honors them all. And it's strange that he would honor
them, why is that? Because he was a Conscientious Objector (C.O.). But
I guess some wars are allowed to be fought. Is every war immoral,
or are some worth fighting? This distinguishes the pure pacifist
from the partial one.
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. It’s 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 grunting
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.
So he's talking about the change in the life style of America due to the
need for people to park their cars someplace. And it is such a factor now
that owning a car is a very important aspect to life. He sees this as not
such a good thing.
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.
This was a serious event in American history. This was when they were allowed
to prove that they were as good as White men on the battle field. Very
important. Similar to the Tuskegee Airmen during WWII.
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 gently 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.
"He cannot bend his back" has two levels
-
Statues can't bend
-
His pride as a human soldier kept his back straight.
He has chosen to live to die for this cause.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of
the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children
rise like balloons.
War has changed. There is no glory in dropping a bomb, just destruction.
This is pointing out the desegregation of schools in the South. This
is just another battle, except being fought by a new generation and even
younger people.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of
the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children
rise like balloons.
So the cars are here, the fish are gone.
The faces of the children are from one of the early integration efforts--Little
Rock is a good example. Ironically, one of the last great battles
over integration would occur in the 1970s right in the area around this
monument--South Boston.