It\u2019s sixty years now that I first encountered the poems of Robert Lowell. I was studying for my Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was already caught up in the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, busy researching his life for my doctoral thesis. That Hopkins was a Catholic poet made all the difference for me in terms of models to emulate in my own life as a teacher and writer. But who else could I find comfort and wisdom in? Were there other poets who had learned from the example of Hopkins? Yes, there was T.S. Eliot, but Eliot had already established his own distinctive voice by the time Robert Bridges published Hopkins\u2019s work\u2014some thirty to forty years after the poems themselves had been written. Then too there was the poetry of David Jones and W.H. Auden.<\/p>\n
But the poet who seemed most deeply influenced by Hopkins\u2019s example\u2014and an American poet to boot\u2014was the young Robert Lowell, whose \u201cQuaker Graveyard in Nantucket\u201d especially spoke to me back then. This was Lowell back in the 1940s, a Catholic conscientious objector and firebrand who\u2019d spent half a year in a Federal prison in Connecticut during the war rather than bear arms after he learned of the Allied bombings of German civilians in the Ruhr Valley.<\/p>\n
My bride and I visited that same Quaker graveyard during our New England honeymoon, for that\u2019s how much Lowell\u2019s words meant to me then. The place was mostly flat and bare, with a few gravestones here and there. These were the fighting Quakers, as Melville memorialized them in Moby Dick,<\/em> members of a peace-loving sect who by the early nineteenth century had turned to the sea to make their fortunes by slaughtering whales for their oil and spermaceti, thus following in the American tradition of capitalism.<\/p>\n The bombing of civilians went against everything that Lowell, Catholic C.O. and convert\u2014Thou shalt not kill<\/em>\u2014needed to believe in to help maintain his fragile sanity. Among the war dead\u2014like Ahab and the crew of the Pequod <\/em>who had perished in their attempt to kill the white whale not for the sake of business, but out of Ahab\u2019s quest to avenge the beast that had taken his leg\u2014was Lowell\u2019s cousin, naval officer Warren Winslow, who had perished when the ammunition on his ship blew up in the straits between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and New Jersey, his body never recovered. And as for the promise of the resurrection? A corpse recovered in the netting, accounted for, only to be returned once more into the depths of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n Where then was the comfort Lowell needed now, in the storm of it all? He offered what he could in the sixth movement of his poem, lines dedicated to Our Lady of Walsingham in northern England, an ancient pilgrimage site destroyed by Henry VIII, where once pilgrims had walked barefoot the final mile to reach the site where the Holy Mother had once appeared, there to offer such peace and comfort as could be had. It was there\u2014and not here in Nantucket\u2014that Lowell invoked the quiet, expressionless face of Our Lady, unveiling in glimpses the mystery of God\u2019s presence even as it watched over Cain\u2019s sin endlessly repeated\u2014brother killing brother, brother killing sister. And if the poet at twenty-nine could not yet comprehend the reality of the Incarnation or the ultimate sacrifice of the Cross, still, he pled, that \u201cthe world shall come to Walsingham.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, Lowell came from old Episcopalian stock, though in his case it was the Boston Brahmin Lowell variety, rather than Seton\u2019s New York blueblood stock. Like Mother Seton, and like Thomas Merton, Lowell too became a convert to Catholicism in a troubled time. And his example meant everything for me as I entered an academic milieu where being a practicing albeit imperfect Catholic brought with it its own difficulties. But then there was Hopkins, John Henry Newman and Lowell and\u2014as I would later learn\u2014the example of Flannery O\u2019Connor, a Catholic from Georgia and the Protestant South. You learn to carry your models close to you, like medals tucked inside your shirt, if you\u2019re lucky enough to have them.<\/p>\n Still, here\u2019s the irony. By the time I discovered Lowell\u2019s Catholic poems, he\u2019d already moved on\u2014crossing the Alps, as it were, from Pius XII\u2019s Rome to the dark Paris of Baudelaire and then on to Maine and the world of \u201cSkunk Hour.\u201d By 1950, he\u2019d divorced his first wife, Jean Stafford, and married his second, Elizabeth Hardwick. He\u2019d already spent months in various psychiatric wards, including McLain\u2019s outside Boston, trying to recover from schizophrenia and manic depression. And though a Catholic convert, he\u2019d still remained a puritan in many of his practices, throwing out a meal during Lent his wife had prepared if he suspected there was even a whiff of meat broth in it. For a time, he attended daily Mass. But he soon found that his new faith\u2014such as he understood it\u2014was more than he could deal with. He could be violent, and smashed his first wife\u2019s face at least twice\u2014once in a car accident, and once with his fist.<\/p>\n By the early \u201850s, he\u2019d left Jean Stafford and his Catholic faith behind.<\/p>\n And when Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Our Blessed Mother into heaven, body and soul, as Catholic dogma in November 1950, that was it as far as Lowell was concerned. And so, in \u201cBeyond the Alps,\u201d the opening salvo of Life Studies,<\/em> a poem composed in 1952, the poet recalls traveling by Pullman train from Rome through the grandeur of the Alps and on to that black classic, Paris. \u201cWhen the Vatican made Mary\u2019s Assumption dogma,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.\u201d<\/em>. What Lowell meant here\u2014darkly enough\u2014was that the crowds cheered on the Pope much as they had cheered on Mussolini in the eternal city a decade earlier:<\/p>\n For Lowell, the Queen of Heaven, like the goddess Minerva, had by then morphed into one more imaginary goddess, one more \u201cmiscarriage of the brain.\u201d And there it was: the Church, the Pope, the Blessed Mother, all left behind now, as Lowell went on to look for other answers, struggling all the while with his manic-depressive episodes like the one he records with that skunk in Castine, Maine, slinking in the garbage, the poem he would close Life Studies<\/em> with. Call it the sad alpha and omega of things for him. For now, instead of finding himself (or losing himself) atop the majestic Alps, he stands on the back steps of his porch, breathing in the rich air as another mother\u2014this one a mother skunk\u2014swills through a garbage pail in a nightmarish sexual scene, jabbing \u201cher wedge-head in a cup\/ of sour cream,\u201d before settling in like a parasite and refusing to scare.<\/p>\n And so it went for the next two decades, until his death at sixty of a heart attack in the back seat of a taxi as he returned to his ex-wife\u2019s apartment on West 68th Street. He was just back from Ireland, having visited his estranged third wife as he returned\u2014shattered\u2014to his second.<\/p>\n Earlier in his career, he\u2019d recalled Dante\u2019s stanzas in his Purgatorio <\/em>about the death of Buonconte da Montefeltro, fatally wounded in the fighting at Compaldino in 1289, and whose body was never recovered. In that passage, Dante, a young soldier then who\u2019d fought on the opposing side, imagined Buonconte calling out to the Blessed Mother as he bled out, and how he imagined that\u2014in her mercy\u2014she\u2019d heard that cry and rescued him. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you the truth,\u201d Lowell wrote, imitating Dante\u2019s voice there,<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0tell it to the living, \u201cLess than ever I expect to be alive,\u201d Lowell wrote eighteen months before his death at sixty. The lines are from a poem he called\u2014fittingly enough\u2014 \u201cHome.\u201d Now, like Dante\u2019s Buonconte, he too called out to Mary, a mother he could trust\u2014unlike his own mother\u2014in lines which can still break the heart. \u201cThe Queen of Heaven,\u201d he sighed,<\/p>\n Which brings us back again to that strong woman, Mother Seton, who, in the midst of her own turmoils and struggles with her own beloved son who had drifted away from so much that she held dear. \u201cThe black clouds I foresee,\u201d she wrote, \u201cmay pass by harmless, or if in Providence of grace they fall on me, Providence has an immense umbrella to hinder or break the force of the storm.\u201d That, she added, was what gave her\u2014and myself, and I hope and pray, my early mentor, Robert Lowell\u2014comfort in a dark time.<\/p>\n
\nto Mary risen\u2014at one miraculous stroke,
\nangel-wing\u2019d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nan angel and devil fought with claws for my soul:
\nYou angel, why do you rob me for his last word?
\n<\/em>The rain fell, then the hail, my body froze,
\nuntil the raging Archiano snatched me,
\nand loosened my arms I\u2019d folded like the cross.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nwe were divorced. She never doubted
\nthe divided, stricken soul
\ncould call her Maria
\nAnd rob the devil with a word.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n