Books: Poet of the Particular

FOR THE UNION DEAD by Robert Lowell. 71 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $3.95.

“The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows,” Robert Frost once wrote in a poem; and another New Englander, Robert Lowell, has created a whole body of durable poetry on that notion.

Lowell is the poet par excellence of the particular. Too prosy for some tastes, he insists that poems must incorporate the prosiness of life; poetry must be as important as prose. He ignores the usual poetical devices that are calculated to woo a reader, makes no concession to sound for its own sake. As he describes Hawthorne in one poem, his head is often bent down, “Brooding, brooding, eyes fixed on some chip,/some stone, some common plant,/the commonest thing,/as if it were the clue.”

The early Lowell was more flamboyant. His verse was intricately allegorical and grandly rhetorical, as in the killing of the great white whale, that symbol of suffering, in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket:

The death lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags, Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather.

Eventually the seas subsided, the storm abated, and the majestic, tormented whale dropped out of Lowell’s poetry. In Life Studies, in fact, Lowell discarded the whole allegorical-religious baggage and became directly, fiercely, even embarrassingly, personal. The poems dealt with his immediate family: his father, whom he despised; his mother, whom he tolerated; his grandfather, whom he loved. His verse was often unfashionably raw and impassioned:

The nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone They’ve all gone into a world of light; the farm’s my own . . . Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!Tears smut my fingers.

Lowell’s latest book of verse, For the Union Dead, is in the manner of Life Studies, but Lowell is making his way back into the world again. The best of these poems have a compactness of phrase that evokes a time and a place with a vividness that comes from “meditation on the true and insignificant,” as in the poem, The Mouth of the Hudson:

A single man stands like a birdwatcher,and scuffles the pepper and salt snow from a discarded, grayWestinghouse Electric cable drum. He cannot discover America by counting the chains of condemned freight-trains from thirty states . . .Across the river, ledges of suburban factories tan in the sulphur-yellow sun of the unforgivable landscape.

Yet Lowell’s grim landscape is relieved by people, people hallowed by compassion. Lowell’s compassion has been tested. Great chunks of his life have been spent in misery and in mental asylums (an experience he has duly and dispassionately recorded in a poem). Now, for the first time, he has kind words for his father; for Jonathan Edwards, symbol of rigid Puritanism; even for that total tyrant, Caligula: “. . . yours the lawlessness/ Of something simple that has lost its law.”

There are poems of lost loves and broken marriages:

Everything’s changed for the best— How quiyering and fierce we were, There snowbound together, simmering like wasps in our tent of books!

But in the best classical sense, Lowell is a balanced poet. Good and evil are poised in his poetry. His darkly glowing poem on Florence is a reminder that beauty, art and civilization are purchased at a high price:

Oh Florence, Florence, patroness Of the lovely tyrannicides! Perseus, David and Judith, Lords and Ladies of the Blood, Greek demigods of the Cross, Rise sword in hand above the unshaven,Formless decapitation Of the monsters, tub of guts, Mortifying chunks for the pack. Pity the monsters! Pity the monsters! Perhaps one always took the wrong side—Ah, to have known, to have loved Too many Davids and Judiths! My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.

Lowell is occasionally obscure, and even his most explicit poems contain elusive overtones that tease the mind—sometimes hauntingly, now and then irritatingly. Few poems end in a tidy moral or a neat epigram. But the fact is that the poetry lives—images linger in the mind, the thing described is seen with stunning clarity; Lowell somehow builds emotion with the most mundane words and images. After reading the title poem, who will forget the statue of the gallant colonel at the head of his Negro soldiers, standing defiant amidst the bulldozers of Boston Common, a reproachful reminder of the forgotten fervor of the old Boston abolitionists, while around him “everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.”