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.

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.
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

The wind is westerly,

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,

Can kill a tiger.

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-

If measured by a glass,

How long would it seem burning! Let there pass

A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze

Is infinite, eternal: this is death,

To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

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.