Certain aspects of prosody in the poetry of Robert Lowell

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Authors Lamont, Thomas Aquinas, 1938-

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/318021 CERTAIN ASPECTS OF PROSODY IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT LOWELL

by

Thomas A, Lamont

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in The University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library* Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission^ provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in their judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship . In all other instances? however^ permission must be obtained from the author*

SIGNED 2

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below;

SO Ap !%3 BARN )S Date Assistant Professor of English ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The writer is greatly indebted to Dr, Barney

Childs for his helpful criticism# suggestions# and a d v ice» ABSTRACT

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the prosody in the poetry of Robert Lowell in order to understand better the evolution of a free-verse form from a traditional form „ The study does not attempt to draw any conclusions from the relation between these two techniques, but merely to show the different aspects of development,

English prosody has always been a controversial subject. An attempt has been made in this paper to avoid the more tenuous areas of prosodic scholarship and to establish what appears to be the most adequate prosodic viewpoint. This policy has resulted in the arbitrary choice of some prosodic approaches, perhaps at the expense of others expounded by reputable poets and scholars* Such limitation is unavoidable in a paper of this length.

The work of Robert Lowell was chosen as a subject for several reasons. He is recognized as a leading poet today and in a relatively short period of time has moved from a traditional form to one that is free. The quantity of his verse is sufficient enough to establish broad movements in technique.

iii In this paper, four of his volumes of poetry will be analyzed from the standpoint of metrics» Patterns of sound and imagery will be dealt with when they contribute to an under­ standing of the prosodic development»

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR. „ . „ » * . » ^ * * i

ACKNOWLEDGMENT * * . * * * . . * . « , . . ii

ABSTRACT @ * D « q .c o »- « * @ * * * □ « » □ » □ 111

Chapter INTRODUCTION . . , «, ... , . . . . . I

I.or PROSODY f » * * * * * « » -»■ * 4 # » * 4 II. THEME AND STRUCTURE . . *. » * , 18

III, THE MOVEMENT OF THE LINE * e * 29 IV, EARLY AND LATE POETRY (2 parts) , , 39 V, PATTERNS OF SOUND , „ , * » * , , , 63

VI. LIFE STUDIES. » * * * 79

BIBLIOGRAPHY * , * , , , , ,, , , , * , 93

v Introduction

Between 1944 and 1960 Robert Lowell has written four volumes of poetry! Land of Unlike ness , Lord Wearv's C astleThe Mill of the Kavanauahs, and Life Studies,

The quality of the poetry and the quality of the style have established him as one of the major poets writing today.

When Land of Unlikeness appeared in 1944, R, P.

Blackmur said that Robert Lowell's verse was a " beautiful case of citation in any argument in support of the belief in the formal inextricability of the various elements of 1 poetry.. . . " The other reviews followed the same pattern: the poetry was excellent , but the tone and style was violent. As Allen Tate said in the introduction: There is no other poetry today quite like this. T. S. Eliot's recent prediction that we should soon see a return to formal and even intricate metres and stanzas was com­ ing true, before he made it, in the verse of Robert Lowell . 2

When Robert Lowell's second volume. Lord Wearv's

Castle, appeared in 1946, it was given such critical acclaim that the poet received an appointment as a

1 "Notes on Eleven Poets, " Kenvon Review> VII (1945) , p. 348 . 2 "Introduction." Land of Unlikeness (n.p.i 1944). Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress/ a Guggen­ heim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Randall Jarrell said: Many of the people who reviewed Lord Weary1 s Castle felt that it was as much of an event as Auden's first book; I can think of no one younger than Auden who has written better poetry than Robert Lowell* s . Anyone who reads contemporary poetry will read it.,» . 3 In 1949 Robert Lowell published Poems 1938-1949 . All the new work was to appear later in The Mills of the Kavanauahs. and the old work was taken from his two earlier volumes. This volume won him national acclaim and he received '^recognition - 4 as a leader of the younger generation of poets . . . .. "

When The Mills of the Kavanauahs was published in

1951, William Carlos Williams said that its six poems were 5 "first-rate. Life Studies was published in 1959; it won the

National Book Award for #petry in 1960 * In the same year Robert Lowell received a grant from the Ford Foundation and was named the Boston Arts Festival Poet. Because of this volume's peculiar style/ so abrupt a change from what had preceded it.

3 "Robert Lowell's Poetry, " in Mid-Centurv American Poets, ed., John Ciardi, p. 158. 4 Hugh B. Staples/ Robert Lowells The First Twenty Years (London: 19 62) / p . 11. 5 Selected Essavs, (New York: 1954), pp. 324-325. the reviews were mixed! 11. , .it is honest and clear, with little attempt at any rhetoric but the simplest; it risks ^ and 6 sometimes falls into - flatness. " Still , Alfred Kazin called 7 it a "remarkable book.11

The availability of the poetry of Robert Lowell for prosodic analysis is based on his acknowledged reputation as one of the most gifted poets writing today. . A further reason., one perhaps more important, is the study of a dis­ tinct change in style by a poet so noted» The first volume

Of Robert Lowell's poetry was violently rhetorical and formal. The last is free verse, In view of the constant opposition between the promoters of free verse and their opponents, a study in a poet who has gone from one of the extremes to the other will be an essential key to the understanding of any formal or free verse.

The following analysis of Robert Lowell' s poetry does not broach the subject of meaning in any depth. Because there are so many individual poems and because an adequate study of meaning in the poems is outside the scope of this paper, the general outlines of meaning will be touched only when they relate to the prosodic analysis .

6 Thom Gunn, "Excellencies and Variety," The Yale Review, XLIV (I960), p. 304.

7 Contemporaries (Boston: 1962), p. 226. Most arts attain their effect by a fixed element and a variable . From, the empiric angle: verse usually has some element roughly fixed and some other that varies/ but which element is to be fixed and which vary,,, and to what degree, is the affair of; the author. 1

Ezra Pound/ ABC of Reading

I Prosody

A poet decides the length of his lines, whether they shall be uniform/ varied to patternf or capriciously irregular; he must pronounce upon rhyme > and/ if he accepts it/ before the end of a suitable number of lines fix its scheme. The result of all these variables and more will be considered laws in some particular poet's prosody, and the tabulation of just such laws is then the work c£." the prosodist. Ideally , then, the prosodist merely analyzes what is there before him, and the difficulties or mistakes he can make as a prosodist will be in relation to how well he hears; but such ideal situations rarely exist in English prosody.

The prosodist finds himself choosing between at least two fundamental approaches, the temporal and the traditional; and, further, he has to decide between two different systems of notation used to record the line of verse, the two stress levels of the traditional and the four stress levels of the lin g u ists.

1 (London: 1934), p. 5. The prosodist is concerned with verse, which comes from the Latin versus > "a turning around as of the plough at the end of the furrow , and thus it meant also a furrow, a row, a line of 2 writing.11 The physical basis of this line of verse is the

Syllable, to which the linguists have given the operational 3 definition "the domain of any stress level." As such, it may contain a single vowel, a diphthong, or either one of these, together with surrounding consonants. The various types of prosody can be classified according to their different approaches to the syllable, and since the syllable is the basis of the line of poetry, these theories will differ radically in their interpre­ tation of the line ,

The discussion of English meter has been dominated by two theories of metrics which are divided over just what type of measure determines the line: Probably the most disputed point in all prosodic theory is the relative importance of time (duration) syllabic length, and stress (acceni) in English verse. Some writers have attempted to explain all the phenomena entirely by stress? others entirely by time* 4

2 Harold W hitehall, "From Linguistics to Criticism,11 Kenvon Review. XVIII (Summer 1956), p. 418 .

3 John Thompson, The Founding of English M eter. (London: 1961), p. 4. 4 Pauli Baum, The Principles of English Versification (Cambridge: 1923), p. 4. 6 The traditional scansionists / such as Saintsbury, maintain that any measure Is composed of an accented (stressed)

syllable and a certain fixed number of unstressed syllables; the temporal scansionists, such as Omond, maintain that a measure of verse is a certain period of time irrespective of the number of syllables, though the termination of that measure may be signalled by a stress.

Omond states that "all metre is essentially rhythmic, that is to say, it consists of equal units, uniform as regards 5 duration. " He is right as far as meter goes . He makes this statement because he observes that the pros odist who scans according to syllable and stress sets up patterns of succession

that, for him, do not really occur: The "feet" of our grammars, the algebraical-looking columns of a. x and x a given in some books of prosody, the rows of crochets and quavers preferred by musical scansionists, all show an imagined regularity not in accordance with fact. 6 As an example of what he means, he takes two lines from "Sing a Song of Sixpence," and states that every line has

seven periods of times A line may either have its full tale of syllables, e . a. ,

Now was/not this/a dain/ty dish/to set/before/ a king ?

5 T, S . Omond, A Study of M etre (Londons 1920), p , 2

6 Ibid ., p . 3. Or it may have a less number, e .g ., 7 by/came/a black-/bird,/and nipt/off/her nose.

Because he sees this distance between the real line and the stress-syllable line he must "fall back on that which underlies these - on the time-spaces or periods of duration in which 8 syllables are, as it were, embedded. " Thus time becomes the basis of verse and the construction of the metrical foot for ©nond. The syllables are comparatively unimportant. In other words, the "periods" of Omond may be occupied by sound or may be left blank.

In Greek and Latin verse "time" referred solely to the period taken in pronouncing syllables . This was held to depend either on vowel-duration or on retardation by separately pro­ nounced consonants . A long syllable was accounted equal to two short arid carried two time-beats as against one apiece 9 for the short syllables. The length of the syllables could not vary in the context of the line? they remained long or short ■ absolutely and under all circumstances:

7 Ibid. , p. 5. 8 Ibid., p. 3. 9 T. S, Omond, English Metrists (Oxford: 1921), p. 42* 8 To make an error in quantity showed clownish ignorance, comparable to our wrongly accent­ ing a familiar word, 10 Omond says that duration is not a significant factor in English verses In English we have nothing analogous to this fixed rule * Our ears are pre sumably not different from those of the Old Greek and Romans, but our habits of speech are different» We have a pow­ erful stress-accent, which reduces quantitative distinction to low and fluctuating values.*.* 11 but his dismissal of time is partially based on his refusal to accept an analogous system in English verse based on stressed and unstressed syllables, and it is tempered by the fact that though he realizes that English verse is not quantitative, he

still places prosodic emphasis on it because he believes its place in our language is real and because it builds up the time-structure of the line.. Omond1 s perception of the function of duration and time in English poetry, in so far as rhythms are

concerned, has had much influence in recent prosody.

The question of accent and its relation to prosody is

essential* It is recognized as one of the most significant

single features in English, but the precise definition of accent

10 A Study of Metre» p. 34. 11 English M etrists , p . 42. has been elusive; The word "accent" is used in English to include both the pitch-accent and the stress-accent; but whatever the connection between these twov they are conceptually^ at any rate., quite distinct; and it is usual to distinguish between "stress-accent" and "pitch-accent" language, even if we merely mean that one or the other element is predominant in any par­ ticular language *12 In a general sense we can agree with W. R. Twaddell and call stress "loudness": In functional linguistic terms*, .a sound may be more prominent than another by timbre (or tamber ), length, or articulatory energy without being louder in a physical sense (i.e ., with a sound wave of greater amplitude or Of greater intensity) „ 13

In Omond’s theory of metre, accent is used as a signal to designate the termination of a time-period. Even the phrase "accentual foot” is a misnomer for him, because he believes that the essential quality of a foot is. duration and that this is 14 not created by accent* For Omond accent can effect nothing except the arrangement of materials already rhythmic through some temporal recurrence. He reaches tnis conclusion because he can find no law that would fix stress inside a given line of verse. He states that a pros odist can speak with conviction about the stress put on syllables but that the stress put on words is variable. So, according to Omond, since the fixed

12 William Be are, Latin Verse and European Song (London; 1957)1, p . 44*- 13 W. P. Twaddell, cited bv John Thompson. The Founding of English Metre, p, 6 note. 14 English M etrlsts, p. 45. 10 accent of syllables is only a small part of our speech-cadence, the wide range of varying accents is not basis for a bound prosody*

This is the first of Omond's strictures against traditional prosody* The traditional scansionist takes the line of verse

to be composed of syllables which are designated accented or

unaccented and divides these syllables into feet on the basis of this designation* iamb, unaccented followed by an accented? 16 trochee, accented followed by an unaccented? etc. If there

is no real mean for deciding whether a monosyllabic word is

acbanted or not, then his objections do hold* A syllable may be accented or unaccented depending upon its linguistic

environment,: however . As Yvor Winters says: The language does not divide itself evenly into accented and unaccented syllables^ but there is almost infinite variation in degrees of accent * For this reason, the basic rule of English scansion is this; that the accented syllable can be deter­ mined only in relationship to the other syllables or syllables within the same foot. The accented syllable of a given foot*. . may be one of the lightest syllables in its line. 17 Thus, for a traditional pros odist, a stressed syllable is one

which is, or seems to be, pronounced more vigorously than those nearby it in the same word or phrase. This does not mean

16 For a list of the principal feet see English M etrists, p . 19. 17 The Function of Criticism (Denver; 1957)., p. 88 . 11 that there will be no disagreement among prosodists on the relative value, of a certain syllable in a cdrtain line; but if we couple to this the fact that the poem as it progresses will reinforce those lines where the matrical pattern is not apparent , then much of Omond1 s criticism on this point is unfounded: The way words have to be emphasized is de­ termined in part by the natural rules of the language, or the pronunciation of words, which meter may influence and modify.... (and) by the context, ** which is being created by the process of the poem*,:* 18 Omond's second criticism is that the terms used to designate

the syllabic feet in English verse bear no resemblance to the Greek and Latin feet from which they were taken:

To.Greeks and Romans dactvllic was a weighty, sonorous, regular measure, used for heroic themes; iambic a light, pliant, colloquial type of verse, admitting a greater variety. With us, though the names are identical, the characters are reversed. ..19 Just what the feet are called in English verse seem to matter little if one is aware that English is a stressed language and not a quantitative

one. Also, the assumption of classical names has been so modified

by the syllabic Scansionist that, in some, the line of verse is divided into rising and falling meters which allow only four basic 2 0, types of feet (the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest).

18 George Stewart, The Technique of English Verse. (N ew York: 1930), p„. 4*

19 A Study of Metre ^ p, 52 >

20 John Ciardi. How Does a Poem Mean? (Cambridge 1960), pp. 921-23. 12 Furtherr a great many of the syllabic differences that Omond notes in two lines from the same poem (see p. 6 ) have been answered by the traditional pros odist's principle of substitution. Winters holds that "an inverted or trisyllabic or other foot may be substituted for an iambic foot in an iambic linez or similar alterations may be introduced into other lines,11 21 and that an unaccented syllable may be dropped,

In the broadest sense, them, we can define Omond's theory as one which says that meter consists either wholly in, or has as an essential feature, some principle of recurrence in equal, or approximately equal, time. The relative importance given to any one of those concepts is essential in judging the whole theory. If one says a poem exists in time, there is very little room for general disagreement. Any poem.) in recitation, occupies an amount of time; duration is the fundamental substance of rhythm. But if one says that all English poetry has as its prosodic (metrical) basis some theory of iso chronic or exact time intervals, we are trying to posit a character of performance or rhythm as a character of prosody or meter: The measurement of verse is determined by some recurrent linguistic feature, peg, obstacle, jut­ ting stress, or whatever» If we read this recurrence so as to give it equal time, this is something we do to it . , . .it is not a part of the linguistic fact which

21 In Defense of Reason (Denver: 1947) p. 108, 13 the poet has to recognize and on which he has to rely in order to write verses* 22 Finally, I believe that neither the system of the traditional

prosodists nor that of Omond is going to be sufficient as a general

theory covering the whole of English poetry, though both have their own validity within certain areas*

What we have in English poetry are several principles of rhythm, due in part to the ambivalent character of the language (Teutonic and Romantic), in part to the influence of French and classical prosody* Native English ("Anglo-8axon") meter, according to Pope ("The Rhythm of Beowulf"), is a falling rhythm of dipodies measurable in 4/8 musical time**** The sources of the living tradition of English verse from Chaucer to the present, however, are medievel Latin and Romance, based on the principle of what Hopkins called "running rhythm" , syllabic yet accentual as well* 23 An attempt to force either of these theories of prosody on the whole of English poetry, or an attempt to say that one principle is better, or more sound, than the other, will result in confusion

and, most probably, error. Omond has insight into the relation between rhythm and duration; the traditional prosodists realized the syllabic nature of a great deal of English verse * Two separate theories attempt to stabilize prosody by listing the various prosodic theories which influence English verse; the three-part theory of Robert Bridges and the four-part

22 W. K* Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C* Beardsley, "The Concept of Meter; An Exercise in Abstraction, " PMLA, LXXXV (December 1959), p. 596* 23 Victor Hamm, "Meter and Meaning," PMLA, LXIX (1954), p. 696 (695-710). theory of Yvor W inters. Bridges classifies three distinct systems of prosody! the quantitive, which we have discussed already; the syllabic. in which only the syllabic length of the line is fixed; and the stress > which fixes a certain number of 24 natural accentual stresses to a line, Yvor Winters lists four systems: the quantitative; the accentual (agreeing with Bridges' stress system); the syllable; and the accentual-syllabic, which is "identical with the classical system in its most general principles, except that accented and unaccented syllables 25 displace long and short, .,," Bridges fails to accept a system analogous to the accentual-syllabic for essentially the same reason that Omond uses: What rules this new stress-prosody will set to' govern its rhythms one cannot foresee / and there is as yet no recognized prosody of stress-verse, I have experimented with it , and tried to determine what those rules must be; and there is little doubt that the perfect prosody will pay great attention to the quantitive value of syllables, though not on the classical system, 26 The final conclusion differs from that of Omond, however* Bridges notes so much variation in the iambic lines of Milton that he cannot accept the lines as iambic and chooses to regard 27 the standard English verse as syllabic.

24 Robert Bridges , "Letter to a Musician on English Prosody, in Collected Essavs and Papers (London 1933), p , 66.

25 p. 106 26 "Letter to a Musician on English Prosody," p. 74.

27 In Defense of Reason, p, 147, • 15 The four systems of Winters, allow for the possibility of Omond's principle of time-period . In the verses of Langland or Coleridge ("Christabel")where a system similar to accentual- syllabic is not functioning , a system of equally timed periods could apply .

The recent activity of the linguists brings up the final problem in any initial study of prosody, especially since they stake out modern poetry as their province:

The traditional "ideal11 metrical pattern of much English verse — patterns based on two-level contrast of stressed versus unstressed syllables - have been orchestrated since Marlowe by a poetic adoption of the actual four-level speech contrast. 28

The linguist brings two new concepts to the study of prosody: four patterns of stress ( //A , \ rw) and four patterns of juncture 29 (//,$■, / but lust what is attempted with them is vague.

Victor Erlich states: Prosody . . .must be "oriented" not toward phonetics 4 that is the physical and physiological description of speech sounds, but toward phonemics, which examines speech sound sub specie of their linguistic function, that is, their capacity for differentiating word mean- , in a s . 30

28 Harold Whitehall, "English Meter," Ken von Review. XVIII (Summer 1956), p. 418. I realize this is a sketchy review of linguistics but it is essentially correct. See Harold Whitehall, "From L inguistics to P o e try ," in Sound and Poetry (New York: 1957) , pp. 134-147.

29 Ibid., pp. 416-419. 30 Victor E rlich, Russian Form alism , (n. p .: 1955), p . 188 (Italics mine.) . 16

Harold Whitehall seems to be saying something similar but with a slightly different emphasis: For the prosodist, the key section of the Trager- Smith Outline of English Structure is that which describes and interrelates.. .the configurational features of English: juncture, stress, and pitch* Taken together, these not only pattern the struc­ tural repetitions essential to any form of rhythm but also cut the speech—flow into sentence word- group, and word segments essential to the . expression Of meaning . 31

Erlich's "word meaning" and Whitehall1 s'lhythm" seem to rest on a misconception of poetic structure, a lack of differentiation between meter, a pattern of cross stress contrasts, and rhythm, which is the result of speech-rhythms being counterpointed on this meter: Meter is an unchangeable and indifferent norm, an unmoved but moving externality. The rhythm in its dynamic and turbulent process of individual experience reacts both towards and against that externality* 32 . If the linguist is interested.in meter, there is no need for the four levels of stres s which he brings to bear* . If the linguist is interested in rhythm, and it would seem that he is, then he is very likely to be recording the performance of the poem and that alone, The prosodist has to remember that the original concern of the linguist is language, not prosodic structure. In

a linguistic analysis, of Robert Frost1 s "Mowing," Seymour Chatman

31 Harold Whitehall, "English M eter," p. 416,

32 Arnold Stein, "A Note on M eter," Kenvon Review XVIII (Summer 1956), p, 459, 33 compared eight performances of the poem* This would seem to be the usual approach, and it is just this procedure that vitiates the approach. But how many performances are neces­ sary before the linguist has arrived at what he wants to call the performance ? Further, why only four levels of stress ? It is not impossible that there be a fifth category, or possibly a

sixth. It is the foot, not the juncture-group, that interests the prosodist.

George Pace has stated that even though the linguist has no reason to map the metrical pattern of a poem, perhaps he may be effective in designating the "rhythm core" (arrived at by a 34 division of rhythm into "potential rhythm" and "rhythm core") * But even here the dangers are inescapable. There seems to be

a great deal of sense in the statement of John Crowe Ransom: We must suppose that there is a good under­ standing between the poet and his audience, ,,. the language is rhythmical, but you can be sure that If you want to read it as prose, the prose is there too* Read according to our meters and we shall not make you into fools * *» 35

33 "Robert Frost's 'Mowing1! An Inquiry into Prosodic Structure, " Kenvon Review, XVIII (Summer 1956), pp, 421-438, 34 George Pace, "The Two Domains: Meter and Rhythm," PMLA. LXXVI, pp. 413-419, 35 "The Strange Music of English Verse.” Kenvon Review, XVIII (Summer 1956) , p , 465, II Theme and Structure

The frontispiece of Land of Unlikeness shows a gargoyle hanging from a cross. It is just this juxtaposition^ almost

Manichean, that might be called the keynote of Lowell' s first volume; but the ambiguity of the symbol itself is an index of the ambiguity of "meaning" in all of Lowell's early poetry, For though Lowell is recognized as a "Catholic" poet, his peculiar brand of Catholicism is composed of a shifting emphasis - now on the vengeance-wreaking of Jehovah, now on redemption through

Christ*. He has succeeded in making salvation seem as real and 1 almost as "frightening as damnation." The Roman Empire in 2 his "Dea Roma" evolves info the Roman Catholic Churcn; but the cnange here is in degreev not in kind, for the Church becomes an overwhelming social-historical fact, a state as terrifying as any secular one. The title of this volume comes from Saint Bernard, a passage showing Lowell's belief in tne split of God and Man: Such is the condition of those who live in the Land of Unlikeness, They are not happy there. Wander­ ing, hopelessly revolving* * ,those who tread this weary round suffer not only the loss of God but also

1 Randall Jarrell, "Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review , XH (1945) , p . 125, 2 Land of Unlikeness (n. p,sl944). Since there are no page numbers in this volume, all subsequent references will be without . page listing.

18 19

the loss of themselves. They dare no longer look their own souls in the face. ,.. For when the soul has lost its likeness to God it is no longer like itself: inde anima dfsslmilis Deo.. inde dissimilis est et sibi; a likeness which is no longer like its original is like itself no more. 3

Lowell's world in this volume is one that has lost the leader" ship of Christ, with the result that man has lost his spiritual dignity and has become satisfied with opportunism and the naked pursuit of power. This attitude toward the "unlikeness" is seen in his treatment of the

Old Law, imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism, Authority, the Father, the "proper Bostonians," the rich who will "do everything for the poor except get off their backs," 4

His attitudes are set in a context or universal significance, for historical perspective allows him to view the militarism of the present day as an extension of the conflict of Gain and Abel and 5 mute the conception of the "Virgin" with Mars and Belloha. The world of his poetry is a world of conflicts: between man and man, man and God, the past and the present, paganism and Catholicism. There is no solution in tnis first volume, no salvation.

3, Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (London: 1940) , p . 58.

4 Randall Jarrell, "Robert Lowell's Poetry," in Mid-Oenturv American Poets , ed, John Ciardi (New York: 1950), p. 159. Robert Lowell said that tnis article contains technical analyses that he agreed with. 5 See "On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception: 1942, " In the introduction to Land of Unlikeness Allen Tate states: Every poem in this book has a formal pattern, either the poet's own, or one borrowed, as the stanza of "Satan's Confession" is borrowed from Drayton's "The Virginian Voyage, " and adapted to a personal rhythm of the poet's own, 6 This immediate subjection to formal patterns gives the poems a feeling of strain, as if they have been wrenched into shape* The language is violently rhetorical, baroque, sometimes bombastic, and often not very effective in those stanzas where the form is especially tight, such as that of Drayton's "The Virginian Voyage,

In fact, Drayton handles the stanza with a greater amount of freedom: You brave Heroique minds. Worthy your Countries name; That Honour still pursue, Goe, and subdue. Whilst loyt'ring Hinds Lurke here at home, with shame, 7

And Lowell:

Adam, you idle-rich Image of the Divine; Tell me, what holds your hand? Fat of the land . My wife’s a bitch; My garden is Love's Shrine, 8

Lowell’s style here is cryptically brief, there is no imagery at all; and while the language itself is forceful, the poet stands

6 "Introduction, " Land of Unlikeness <■ 7 H, J, C» Grierson and G, Bullough, e d .» The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford: 1934), p, 49,

8 "Satan’s Confession," Land of Unlikeness, 21 removed, as though speaking from the end of a long corridor „ But what is interesting Is Lowell*s chMce of this particular work from which to choose his stanza form. Drayton1 s poem bears a thematic relation to Lowell* s, an inverse relation; for while Drayton is attempting to spur the idle towards a new world, Lowell is spurring the idle in a world that will continue to be old, complacent in its idleness.

This thematic mannerism is seen in many of the other formal adoptions of Lowell , most notably in a poem whose form adopts very well because it is not as tight as the Drayton stanza - Donne*s "The Baite „" Come live with raee, and bee my love, And wee will some new pleasure prove Of golden sands r and christall brookes. With silken lines, and silver hookes. There will the river mhispering runne Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the Sunne. And there the 'inam or'd fish will stay , Begging themselves they may betray. 9 and Low ell1 s: Once fishing was a rabbit's foot; O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot. Let suns stay in or suns step out; Life dance a jig on the sperm-whale' s spout; The fisher1 s fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. 10

9 John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (New York; 1952) ^ M* Coffin ed», p» 36, M ost of the sim ilarities noted in this chapter come from my own research, so there is possibility of error, 10 Land of Unlike ness. Lowell's tlsnerman is a twisted version of Donne's. There is only an ironic relation between the " silken lines and silver

hookes" 01 Donne and the "fluent and obscene" fisherman of, Lowell. The second and third lines of Lowell’s poem recall these lines from Whitman's "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking": "Winds blow south, or winds blow north,/ Day come 11 wnite, or nxgnx come black .,, «" This relation introduces a further contrast, one between the America of Whitman and that of Low ell.

"In Memory of Arthur Winslow" is adapted from Matthew

Arnold’s "The Scholar-Gypsy." It is an indication ot what is to follow in Lord Weary's Castle, Go, for they call you. Shepherd, from the hill; Go, Shepherd, and untie tne wattled cotes: No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropp'd grasses shot# another head. But when the fields are s till, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only tne white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and re cross the strips of moon-blanch'd green; Come, Shepherd, and again begin tne quest. 12

11 Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking," in Fifty Great Poets (New York: 1952) , p. 36. 12 Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch, e d ,, The Oxford Book of English Verse (New York: 1940) , p . 919. 23 and Lowell's:

Grandfather Winslow, look, the swanboats coast That island in the Public Gardens, where The bread-stuffed ducks are brooding, where with tub And strainer the mid-Sunday Irish scare ; The sun-struck shallows for the dusky chub, This Easter, and the Ghost Of Risen Jesus walks the waves to run Arthur upon a trumpeting black swan Beyond the Charles 'River to the Acheron Where the wide waters and their voyager are one. 13

In Lowell's stanza there is only one end-stopped line; and even though the rhythms set up are very loose , the relaxation of the previously tight rhythms is effective* The constriction of rhythm that mars many of the poems in this volume seems to be what Robert Lowell is talking of when he says that Shelley can just rattle off terza rima by the page, and it's very smooth, doesn't seem an obstruction to him - you sometimes wish it were more difficult, Well someone does that today and in modern style it looks as though he's wrestling with every line and may be pushed into confusion, as though he's having a real struggle with form and content. Marks of that are in the finished poem. 14 Land of Unlikeness was a hurdle that Robert Lowell had to climb before he could reach Lord Wearv's Castle and The Mills of the Kava- nauahs. Even the poems that are carried over from his first volume in Lord Wearv's Castle are not as savage and violently religious, but more immediate and personal, while the rhythms and imagery are less willed and explicit.

13 Land of Unlikeness.

14 Frederick Seidel, "An Interview with Robert Lowell, " Paris Review> XXV (Winter-Spring 1961), p. 64. 24

I took out several that were paraphrases of early Christian poems, and I rejected one rather dry abstraction, then whatever seemed to me to have a messy violences All the poems (transferred) nave religious imagery, I think, but the.ones I took were more concrete „ That's what the b ook was moving . toward; less symbolic imagery. There seemed to bee too much twisting and disgust in the first book. 15 There are still adaptations in Lord Wearv's Castle, but

they consist mostly in what Lowell calls "imitation*” "When I use the word after below the title of a poem, what 16 follows is not a translation but an imitation.. , " These imitations range from Sextus Propertius to Cobbett and most of them are set in rough adaptions of the Italian and Shakespearian

sonnet* Of the two that are not, one is in the stanzaic pattern of Donne's "A Nocturnal on St. Lucy's Day" and the other is two nine-line stanzas. The only irregular stanza form retained from the Land of Unlikeness is that of Arnold's "The Scholar-Gypsy."

The break with the Land of Unlikeness is not complete *

Lowell is still concerned with the enervation and brutality of the present state of man. and can speak in his former loud, intricate,

and rhetorical voice; Our Fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced tneir gardens with the Redman's bones; Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland. ... .17

15 Ib id . . p . 63, 16 Lord Wearv's Castle (New York; 1947), "Note , "

17 "Children of Light," p. 28* 2,5

In many poems# however> this attitude is set in terms of a dramatic or personal perspective. He treats Napoleon and Charles the Fifth. A single line of Dante inspires him to reconstruct the tragedy of an Italian soldier:

Where is that Ghibelline whom Dante met On purgatory' s doorstep* without kin To set up chantries for his God-held debt? 18 In "1790" cruelty is not a cosmic gesture# but an underplayed * intensely personal action: »».a spaniel mucked with tar Gut by his Highne s s' ankles on the double-quick To fetch its stamping mistress, Louis smashed Its backbone with a backstroke of his stick: Slouching a little more than usual* he splashed As boyish as a stallion to the Champs de Mars. 19

There is another strain in Robert Lowell's poetry that appears in several poems in Lord Wearv's Castle and may be found in most of the poems of The Mills of the Kavanauahs. One of the adaptions in Lord Wearv's Gastie is a close rendering - in many places a word-for-word copy - of Jonathan Edwards' Narrative of

Suprisina Conversions: September twenty-second# Sir: today I answer. In the latter part of May* Hard on our Lord's Ascension, it began To be more sensible. A gentleman Of more than common understanding * strict In morals, pious in behavior, kicked against our goad, 20

18 "The Soldier*" p ,35

19 p. 40

20 "After Surprising Conversions *" p . 60 26 This is whatI would call a dramatic monologue . It probably grows out of Lowell's increasing awareness of the personal and shows a greater ease in diction;f I do not mean to imply that the impersonal or rhetorical poems of Lord Wearv's Gas tie

are inferior, merely that they use a different and more supple brand of versification. This strain in Lowell1 s poetry is seen in parts of "The First Sunday in Lent" and. the opening of - "Mary Winslow" as well as in most of the poems in The Mills of

the Kavanauahs.

The difference between the opening of the title poem of The Mills of the Kavanauahs;

The Douay Bible in the garden chair Facing the lady playing solitaire In blue-’jeans and a sealskin toque from Bath Is Sol her dummy. 21 and "Salem" from Land of Unlikeness;

In Salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips To the canvas flapping on the seaward panes Until the knitting Seaman stabs at ships Nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's Asylum. 22 . presents the polarity, of versification between Lowell's first

volume and his third.

Thematically, also, there seems to be a great change in

this third volume. In the previous two volumes, Land of Unlikeness

21 (New York: 1951), p. 3.

22 Land of Unlikeness. 27 and Lord Wearv1 s C astle.. the emphasis was on dogma ritual/, and the symbolism of the Church. The first version of the title poem/ "The Mills of the Kavanaughs^ " which 23 appeared in the Kenvon Review, contained allusions to the Virgin Mary and to St. Patrick? all these allusions were omitted in the version that was reprinted in The Mills of the Kavanauahs.

As Hugh Staples said? ...there is a theme of opposition to Catholicism in much of this poetry that goes beyond mere indifference. The Douay Bible in "The Mills of the Kavanaughs" is not simply a partner in Anne Kava- naugh's game of Patience, it is "Sol her dummy , " - as Lowell makes clear in a note - her opponent. 24

The absence of Christian and Catholic symbolism is. apparent.

Except for sporadic instances in the other poems, "Mother Marie Therese" is the only poem that develops a theme involving a religious attitude and its approach is rather unusual? After Mother died, "an emigree in this world and the next, ” Said Father Turbot, playing with his text. 25

This seeming change is not theological but aesthetic? the poem tries to be a poem and not a piece of artless religious testimony. ...there is a question of whether my poems are religious or just use religious imagery. In many ways they (the later poems) seem to me more religious than

23 Kenvon Review. XII (1951), pp. 1-19.

24 Robert Lowell; The First Twenty Years (London? 1962), p . 55. 25 p. 36-37. 28 the early ones, which are full of symbols and references to Christ and God* I'm sure the symbols and the Catholic framework didn't make the poems religious experiences. * .* I don't think my experience changed very much. 26 What has changed in this third volume is perspective . Characters are being created, and the poems move from inside them* Perhaps this accounts for some of the difficulty in a poem like "The Mills of the Kavanaughs." The progression is not logical but personals "She has a heart and she's alive,. I hope f and she has a lot of color to her and drama.2 7

26 "An Interview with Robert Lowell, " p. 94.

27 I b id ., p . 75. Ill The Movement of the Line

Essential to any study of Robert Lowellls prosody is a close analysis of his staple line - iambic pentameter» As

John Ciardi has said* "Lowell does pnt the heroic line through 1 paces it hasn't performed for a long tim e," Even though there are many irregularly structured poems in all of the first three volumes of his poetry^ the iambic line remains a norm from which Lowell departs only to return again* The peculiar tech­ nical genius of Lowell lies in the way he avoids any monotonous iambic movement within this rather strict limitation he has set for himself*

2 John Crowe Ransom lists three possible exceptions that can be admitted in an iambic lines two unstressed syllables can replace the one of the iamb if elision is possible in actual speech or only theoretically; there can be an extra unstressed syllable after the tenth# and in any foot except the ' 3 last/ the iamb may be reversed. The use t° which Lowell puts these allowed exceptions # both singly and in conjunction^ allows

1 John Ciardi/. "Letter," Poetry * LXXII (1948) / p, 2 63 ,

2 Similar exceptions are noted by John Ciardi/ How Does a Poem Mean? (Cambridge; 1959) + pp* .923-924* and Yvor.Winters* In Defense of Reason (Denver: 1947) * pp. 107-111. I have chosen Ransom because of his relation with Lowell; see "John Ransom's Conversation. " Sewanee Review* XVIII (1948) r pp .. 275-277.

3 "English M eter.11 Sewanee Review. XVIII (Summer 1956)* p . 471. 29 30 him to work within the limits of an iambic line yet effect a variety of statements,

Lowell uses trochaic substitution freely^ but his most widespread use of it is. in the initial foot of the lines

i i i i i Drvina upon the crooked nails of time r I. H 1 < 1 Dirtv Saint Francis, where is Jesus1 blood, i i i » i Salvation's only Fountainhead and Flood? 4

Here he creates a semblance of falling rhythm but immediately jerks the line back into an iambic, rising movement. He seldom uses the reversed iamb in the second foot and never in the fifth or final foot, but he will use it in the third: Now south and south and south the mallard heads.

His green-blue bony hood echoes the green I 1 Flats of the W eser,»,, 5

When he uses two substituted trochees in one line the effect is » i i i i 6 startling: Here the iack-hammer jabs into the ocean,,,.

4"Cistercians in Germany," Land of Unlikeness, (Italics in all Lowell citations mine,) , 5 “The North Sea Undertaker' s Complaint, ” Lord Weary1 s Castle, p, 33, 6 " Colloquy in Black Rock, " Lord Wearv's Castle, p , 5* 31

The substituted anapest is used with the same

regularity and with the same freedom* Lowell will substitute in any foot in the line except the fifth, though not necessarily

where elision would be theoretically possibles * * , i * l A clutter of Bible and weeping willows guards i i | i * The stern Colonial magistrates and wards * * i i i Of Charles the Second, and the clouds i ; i i i Weep on the just and unjust as they will* *, * 7 Perhaps this is what Ransom meant when he said that "a line may become bigger and, and perhaps better, yet remain a pentameter 8 lin e «o. o1

Along with the three rules Ransom rephrased from Bridges,

he stated another that he thought should be included: "Any two successive iambic feet might be replaced by a double or ionic 9 foot* " There are two types of ionic feet: the greater ionic, which is two stressed syllables followed by two unstressed;.

and the smaller, which is two unstressed followed by t#o stressed«,

Yvor Winters mentions essentially the same thing when he

develops the possibility of spondaic substitution; he believes

7 "Dunbarton, "Land of Unlikeness»

8 The W orld1 s Body (New York: 1938), p» 97

9 "English Meter, " p. 471* 32 that it is a momentary abandoning of the accentual-syllabic sprung -rhythm. According to Winters it occurs where in any four syllables the "accentual weight of the first and third places is increased to equal approximately the weight of the second 10 and the fourth."

Lowell seems to favor both of these principles in his verse. In "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" there are examples of smaller ionics:

...the untimely stroke

i i i i i Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell £ I I A In the old mouth of the Atlantic. 11 While in "Cistercians in Germany" is a greater! Here

Puppets have heard the civil words of Darwin i i Clang, clang, while the divines.... 12 There are also numerous examples of Winters' conception of i i i i syllabic sprung-rhythm! ’ How dry time screaks in its fat 13 axle-grease...." The first four syllables of this line might possibly be scanned into an iambic movement/ but the

10 In D efense of Reason (New York! 1947) , p . 110. Also see John Ciardi, How Does a Poem M ean?f p. 922.

11 Lord Wearv's Castle, p. 14.

12 Land of Unlikeness.

13 Ib id . 33 slight difference between the stresses, if there is an audible difference, does not lend itself to any such distinction.

Much of the stress ambiguity that results from ionics and syllabic sprung-rhythm is the result of the tendency in Lowell to compound* According to George Pace, a great many 14 compounds have relatively equal stress levels „

Here the Dragon's Sucklings tumble on the steel—scales and puff Billows of cannon—fodder from the beaks Of be e-hive camps, munition—pools and scrap—heaps And here the S e rp e n t,*** 15 The conjunction of anapestic and trochaic substitution coupled with ionics and jammed stresses (or Winters' syllabic sprung-rhythm) produce lines which do not seem even faintly iambic; When the whale's viscera go- and the roll Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood' s Hole And Martha's Vineyard, Sailpf, will your sword Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears. 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, Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers Where the morning stars sing out together

14 "The Two Domains; M eter and Rhythm, 11 PMLA, LXXVI (1961), p. 417,

15 "Cistercians in Germany," Land of Unlikeness, 34 And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers %he red flag hammered in the mast-head * Hide, Our steel,, Jonas M essias, in Thy side,: 16 Here the intensification of trochaic and anapestic substitution, j; j X and the use of the words "vineyard, “ "sailor, " "coiling,"

"blubber, " "heaving, " "morning," "thunder, " and "hammered” - even when they are not scanned as trochees inside the line - temporarily create a trochaic rhythm* The entire passage answers to Gerard Manley Hopkins4', description of " counter­ point rhythm* " If, however, the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard forgoing rhythm.. .two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together , and this is Counterpoint Rhythm. 17 It is lines like these that make his verse appear "one of lumped tension, of a half-awkward clptting-up of otherwise strict 18 alternation. ... "

16 "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," Lord Weary*s Castle.» p . 12. 17 Gerard Manlev Hopkins* Poems and Prose. W. H* Gardner ed*, (Londons 1953), p. 8.

18 John Hollander, "Robert Lowellls New Book," Poetrv. XCV (1959) , p . 44* 35 Lowell also uses another type of counterpoint* I believe Hopkins is talking of what I would call "metrical counterpoint^ " the counterpoint of a falling meter against a rising (though actually the falling meter is a rhythm) or an iambic line against a trochaic. The second type of counterpoint which Lowell is using, I believe, I would call the counterpoint of speech-rhythms; it becomes, ultimately, not the simultaneous running of rhythms inside the same prosodic system but the juxtaposition of two prosdsodic systems - the accentual and the accentual-syllabic* Robert Bridges defines stress-prosody in this way: In this system the natural accentual speech-rhythms come to the front, and are the determining factor of the verse, overruling the syllabic determination. . These speech-rhythms were always presents they constituted in classical verse the main variety of effects within different metres, but they were counterpointed. so to speak, on a quantitive rhythm, that is, on a framework of strict (unaccented) time.:.* 19

Northrup Frye explains that this is due to a " similarity between the pentameter line of Milton and Shakespeare and the older (or newer) 20 , English strong-stress meter*" The reader is further conditioned to catch this counterpointed four-stress rhythm because it is used in lines where one of the five stresses has been lowered enough to where, in other lines , it might have been assumed into a substituted anapestic foot»

19 "Letter to a Musician on English Prosody, ” in Collected Essavs and Papers (London: 1933) , pp, 71-72 . 20 "Lexis and Melos," in Sound in Poetry (New Yorks 1956) p . xv. 36

1 The peg-leg and reproachful chancellor 2 With a forget-me-not in his batton-hole

. 3 When the unseasoned fiberators roll ^ f X X X 4 Into the Market Square, ground arms before

J t X X: X X 5 The Rathaus; but already lily-stands x- x i x i 6 Bargeon the risen Rhineland, and a roughz 7 Cathedral lifts its eye, 21

In each of these lines the counterpointed accentual-rhythm is emphasized by alliteration. In the sixth line it is achieved

through a frontal consonant; in the second by near-rhyme; in the fourth by the repeated "r's"; and in the first by a combination of this factors.

Besides Lowell’s iambic line,, in Land of Unlikeness and Lord Wearv's Castle there are many instances of tetrameter and trimeter and dimeter lines, 'The instances of tetrameter and trimeter are relatively slight, so they will hot concern us; but the high incidence of the trimeter line warrants analysis . In both volumes it is used in separate poems and as one of the basic interjectdd lines, "The Bomber" is three stanzas of fourteen lines, in trimeter. " Concord Cemetery After the Tornado, " also in Land of Unlikeness , is three ten-line stanzas of trimeter; and "At the Bible House" (Lord Wearv's Castle) is thirty lines of trimeter. The lines in all of these poems are iambic, but the syllabic count can run as low as five and as

21 "The Exile's Return," Lord Wearv's Castle, p. 3, high as eight,. j X I Bomber climb out on the roof i x X Where your goggled pilots mock#.

X X With positive disproof#

j x 'x David'S and Sibyl's Bluff* "Will God put back the clock Or conjure an Angel Host When the Freedoms police the world?" 22

The variations follow the same patterns seen in the iambic line *

There is an inverted iamb in the first line and a substituted anapest; line two ~ a substituted anapest? line three - normal iambic movement; line four - an inverted iamb. The last line contains eight syllables# three stresses# and two substituted a n ap e sts.

The same phrasing seen in earlier pentameter lines enforcing a counterpointed four-stress line works here to counterpoint a two-stress lines You spoke Whistling gr is tie -words Half inaudible . To usi of raw—boned birds

22 "The Bomber# " Land of U n lik en ess. The movement here is similar to Auden's "September 1# 1929 ," Modern Verse in English (New Yorks 1958) t David Cecil and Allen Tate ed* * p. 519. 38

l A * Migrating from the smoke Of cities.... 23

Of course the counterpointing here is different than that seen in the iambic line * The rhythms do not achieve any­ where near the linear play in this short line that they do in the longer one.

The difference noted between the two types of counterpointing is slight, but the effect it has on the poetry of Robert Lowell is decisive. Hopkins' type of counterpointing will result in a line that is heavily jammed with stresses^ while Bridges' counterpointing will result in a looser, more pliable line. The essential change, then , in Lowell's line as seen in his first three volumes is a move from a line counterpointed like Bridges'. This corres~ ponds with the thematic change we noted earlier.

As the geographical limits of his poetry contract Lowell's vision turns inward, so that in his latest work, he is concerned less with cosmic conflicts or social satire than with his own emotional reactions to people and situations important to his personal life. 24

23 "At a Bible H o u se ," Lord W earv's C a s tle . p . 30. See Archibald M acleish's "Ezry" for a similar movement. Modern Verse in English, p. 362; and Richard W. Shelton, "Certain Aspects of Prosody in the Verse Dramas of Archibald Macleish, " unpublished master' s thesis . University of Arizona, 1961, pp. 25-42. 24 Hugh Staples ■ Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years, (London: 1962), p. 16.. IV Earlv and Late Poetry

Though it is dangerous to point to one poet as an influence on all the early work of Robert Lowell t the sim i­ larities between the poetry of Milton and that of Lowell are ' 1 significant and extensive enough to warrant the statement *

The simple juxtaposition of two early poems, one by each poet* points towards the relation* Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold. Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones. Forget no: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep and their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they , To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O'er all the Italian fields where still doth sway The triple tyrant: that from these may grow A hundredfold, who having learned thy way Early may fly the Babylonian woe, 2 and Lowell's: Here Charlemagne's stunted shadow plays charades With pawns and bishops whose play-canister Shivers the Snowman's bones, and the Great Bear Shuffles away to his ancestral shades. For here Napoleon Bonaparte parades; Hussar and cuirassier and grenadier Ascend the tombstone steppes to Russia, Here The eagles gather as the West invades

1 See Randall Jarrell, "Poetry in War and Peace , " Partisan Review, XII (1945), p, 124, 2 Harris Francis Fletcher, ed. , The Complete Poetical Works of Tohn Milton (New York: 1941), p* 133. Milton* s fourth line in the , poem above was used by Lowell in "Children of Light," Lord Wearv's Castle , p, 28, 40 The Holy Land of Russia# Lord and glory Of dragon!sh, unfathomed waters, rise* Although your Berezina cannot gnaw These soldier-plumed pontoons to matchwood, ice Is tuning them to tumbrils, and the snow Blazes its carrion-miles to Purgatory* 3

The description in both these passages is extraordinarily similar, though the tone of the poems is different: Lowell's "cannot gnaw", "carrion-miles, " and "dragon!sh, unfathomed waters" and Milton's "moans/to heaven,” "slaughtered saints," and "martyred blood and ashes #" The basic similarity is in the structure of these "sonnets#" Both poets take advantage of every run-on line they can. The octave and sestet in both poems are divided by a sentence starting at the end of the ninth line #

Even the medial line-breaks are modulated in a similar way*

But it is not in the short poems that, the relation is as explicit as the similarities between "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "Lycidas*" Thematically the structures are similar; both deal with a death by drowning and both are elegies (or monodies) * Lowell's poem was first printed in the 4 Partisan Review as nine stanzas of 194 lines, divided, like the lines of "Lycidas, " into loose stanzaic structures of pentameter lines varied by an occasional trimeter. The stanzas of both range in line-length with each stanza having its own

3 "Napoleon Crosses the Berezina, " Lord Weary*s C a stle , p# 34#

4 P artisan Review, Xtl (1945) , pp. 170-174# 41 highly intricate rhyme-scheme differing from the rhyme-

scheme of the other stanzas only slightly* Both poets

enlarge the elegaic form by broaching universal issues at

the end of the poems . It is difficult to decide which poem

John Crowe Ransom is describing when he speaks of a poem

that is composed of a stanza of indeterminate length/ running it might be to twenty lines or so, marked by some intricate rhyming scheme/ and by a small number of six-syllable lines inserted among the ten-syllable lines which constituted the staple * 5

We should remember that the principal exceptions noted in Lowell's lines earlier were Ransom's resetting of Robert Bridges* prosodic explanation of Milton* Rowell himself/, in reviewing Dylan Thomas, says that anyone

who has read Bridges* Study of Milton's Prosody must admire the strange skill with which Thomas varies the strict iambic lines of his earlier poems. The easy and loose movement of his later syllabic stanzas is as remarkable. 6

Except for the rhyme and the nine-stanza placement, though, the other prosodic features of Lowell's poem draw more from the sources of earlier and later Milton than from

5 The W orld's Body (New York: 1938) , p. 7 * Ransom is speaking of "Lycidas. " 6 "Thomas, Bishop, and Williams, "Sewanee Review. LV (1947), p. 493. 42 nLycidas" itself* It seems as though Lowell had taken the frequent use of interjected three-stress lines seen in the Choruses of Samson Aaonistes , the Psalm Paraphrases > and earlier poems like "On Time , " the heavy enjambement of Paradise Lost. and the irregular paragraph fingering seen in

Milton’s later poetry,- and then intensified all of this in one broad form adopted from "Lycidas = " The importance of Lowell's poem does not lie in its relation to Milton; however, it is important because it stands as a prosodic focal point for most of his poetry until The Mills of the Kavanauahs.

Theoretically, the line of iambic pentameter may have a break after any syllable, or may be without one altogether; practically , both Lowell and Milton make use of every one of these possibilities: after the first syllable: Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham 7

after the second syllable: Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea (I, line 17, p. 8)

after the third syllable: Off 'Sconset, where the yawing ;S-boats splash (II, line 7, p. 9)

after the fourth syllable: In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute (I, line 23, p. 8)

7 "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, " Lord Wearv's Castle, VI, line 20 , p. 13. All subsequent notations will be made in the text. 43

after the fifth syllable! The Pequod's sea wings^ beating landward^ fall (II, line 2 p* SB after the sixth syllable: The clocks! off Madaket, where the lubbers lash (IIv line 10f p. 9)

after the seventh syllable: On Ahabls void and forehead; and the name (Ij- line 15, p. 8)

after the eighth syllable: In the mad scramble of their lives. They died (III, line 13, p. 10) . after the ninth syllables When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light (I, line 4, p. 8)

after the tenth syllable: Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, (I, line 3, p. 8)

no break: Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast.,.. (II, line 18, p & 9)

Also, in theory, we might expect to find up to ten breaks in any single line, but in this poem there are seldom more than two, a principle that Lowell - nor Milton - rarely violates in any line of his poetry.

Though Lowell does substitute irregularly with three- stress lines, there are parallels, rhythmic parallels, between sections of a stanza or entire stanzas. To define this further, the poem is divided into seven sections. The opening twenty-six lines of the first section alternate three 44 and five-stress lines in this manner: 5555535533

555553533355532The second section has no irregular

three-stress and corresponds to the seventh section. The third section echoes the beginning of section one^ but after ten lines develops it's own pattern „ The fourth‘section and the sixth section develop similarly: two stanzas of 5555535555* The same pattern is repeated in other poems ("The Death of the Sheriff, " "In Memory of Arthur Winslow, " and "Where the

Rainbow Ends") * The seventh section follows no repeated pattern*

The poetic virtuosity demanded in any single stanza that combines irregular three'-stress lines with iambic pentameter, a loose rhyme (sometimes couplets, sometimes 8 alternate or flatly irregular) made mobile by near-rhyme, and extensive enjambement coupled with loose medial line- break, is staggering* There are so many ways in which a

construction like this can fail, such delicate rhythmic balance necessary, that even partial success is an achievement.

In speaking of the paragraph fingering in Milton's verse, T* S. Eliot says that

Milton's verse is especially refractory to yielding its secrets to examination of the single line. For his verse is not formed this way. It is the period, the sentence, and still more, the

8 The full range of rhyme will be treated later. 45 paragraph^- that is the unit of Milton’ s, verse; and emphasis on the line is the minimum necessary to provide a counter-pattern to the period structure v It is only in the period that the wave-length of Milton’s verse is to be found: it is his ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every para­ graph^ such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context., and his ability to work in longer musical, units than any other poet* «.. 9 Using a stanza of the "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" as a unit/ in the way that Eliot suggests/ I believe we can see the prosodic method in most of the early poetry of Robert Lowell „

1 All you recovered from Poseidon died 2 With you/ my cousin/ and the harrowed brine 3 Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,

4 Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain/ 5 Nantucket's westward haven. To Cape Cod X i j 6 Guns, cradled on the tide/

7 Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock 8 Of bilge and backwash/ roil the salt and sand

} - vi X 9 Lashing earth's scaffold, rock

10 Our warships in the hand 11 Of the Great God., where time’s contrition blues, 12 Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost 13 In the mad scramble of their lives. They died

14 When time was open-eyed

9 Annual Lecture on a Master Mind: Milton, Read 26 March/ 1947, pp. 12-13. 46

15 Wooden and childish; only bones abide 16 Therer in the nowhere. where their boats were tossed 17 Ekv-hiah. where mariners had fabled news

18 Of IS j the whited monster . What it cost

19 The is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick 20 1 see the Quakers drown and hear their cry;

21 "If God himself had not been on our sider 22 If God himself had not been on our side t 23 When the Atlantic rose against,. us, why, 10 24 Then, it had swallowed us up quick , "

Prosodically there are three levels working within this poem; the iambic norm^ counterpointed rhythms similar to those which Hopkins described, and interjected three-stress lines (six-syllable) „ The section whose stresses I have marked from line four to line eleven contains all of these elements, Line three has a substituted trochee; line four starts with a substituted trochee and ends with a substituted anapest; line five runs in strict iambic pentameter; line six is an interjected six-syllable line* While this is what is happening inside the lines, the movement of the poem that sets these lines against one another through pause and enjambement produces the total rhythmic

effect*

10 p* 10 47 The large rhythmic outline and the intricate inner™ movement of this stanza is controlled by pauses« Grammatical

pauses interrupt the metric rhythm and are u s e d for the sake of sense or to separate the different and varying sections of the 11 speech rhythm* These may be syntactical or rhetorical and they correspond to the ends of sentences, clauses, and phrases; they are usually indicated by varying means of punctuation* The second type of pause refers to breaks in the speech-rhythms and may occur either at the line divisions or in the middle of 12 lines to balance "groups of vowel and consonant sounds , "

To explain further, normally, at the end of a line of poetry (whether verse or not) there is a performance pause. In a line of verse the pause is emphasized when there is a repetition of

a similar cadence - that is, as in the case of Lowell, where the poet does not invert the last foot in a five-foot iambic line so that the line will end on a cadence effected through an 13 unstressed-stressed relation between the final syllables. A sharp end-rhyme represents not only similar vowel and consonant- 14 sounds but a repetition of similar cadences as well; and if the

11 This is essentially what Bridges says„ See "Letter to A Musician on English Prosody," pp. 58-59 . 12 S* Ernest Sprott, Milton1 s Art of Prosody (Oxford: 1953), p . 113. 13 For a treatment of "cursus endings," see Morris Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," Studies in Philology (January 1919), pp.. 1-55. 14 Henry Lanz says it affects us rhythmically because it affects us melodically, but this does not change the point. The Physical Basis of Rime (London: 1931), p* 237, 48 rhyme is regular and consistent/ the pauses will he so marked that a verse paragraph is impossible^ since it depends on a quick run-over line. With the kind of near-rhyme employed by Lowell this danger is minimized .

It is not until the fifth line of the quoted passage that we catch a sharply rhymed word/ and then the rhyme disappears until the ninth line ,

The pauses that occur in the middle of a line are more difficult to explicate, They are not grammatical pauses and do not depend on punctuation/ but somehow break the line so that it lies in rhythmical balance/ the two halves played against one another. Because it is a matter of individual reading/ and partially because a student of literature might be more apt to hear the medial/ rhythmic pause / being conditioned by a great deal of 16th and 17th century English poetry/ it is difficult to state with certainty just where the pause does lie: Whenever the winds are moving / and their breath (» + +.*) Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks / of this pier/ / The terp# and. sea-gulls tremble / at your death* ,, 15

Lowell obscures the medial pauses even further by breaking 16 many of his enjambed lines both before and after the verb so that the appearance of the verb in the middle of a line produces

15 "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket/" p* 9,

16 See lin es 8* 9/ 11., 12/ 13/ 15/ 16* 49 a pause that seems to hover. This medial pause is used by many poets of our decade who have adopted the slash ( / ) I have interposed above to indicate "a pause so light that it hardly separates the words , yet does not want a comma — which is an interruption of meaning rather than 17 the sounding of the line,,*,"

In this section the finely balanced pauses subtly move rhythmic sections against each other to reinforce the jammed stresses within the lines by insisting on linking final iambs (lines 15, 8, 9) with initial trochees (16, 9, 6),

The jamming of these stresses, in turn, slows the line until the stresses loosen into a regular iambic or an anapestic movement. One poem may obviously urge the voice at a faster pace than does another* Within the same poem, moreover, one part may urge itself much more rapidly than another . Even within, an indi­ vidual line, one phrase may clearly be indicated as moving more rapidly or more slowly than another. For, * .poetry in particular , carries within it a series of unmistakable notations that tell the reader how any given passage should be read. 18

This rhythmic movement from extreme tension to relaxation characterizes a great deal of Lowell's early work.

17 Charles Olson, "Projective Verse, ” The New American Poetry * Donald M. Ailed, ed. , (New York: 1960), p. 393. 18 John Ciardi, How Does a Poem M ean? , pp, 920-921» 50 If all poems are born as rhythm,- then some, it seems may be born as rhythms of ideas, that is, as patterns of syntax rather than patterns of sound* And this would make syntax the very nerve of poetry« 19

Attempting to pin down the precise relation between syntax and rhythm is unsettling. But even though a position that posits the "idea" as moulder of rhythm or rhythm as moulder of idea is difficult to explain, syntax may be dealt with purely in relation to the way a single idea may develop in a verse paragraph, Alan Stephens says that the "norm" in all verse 20 is "the formal architecture of the sentence," If this is true, then the way in which Lowell arranges his long sentences over his varying line lengths is going to be linked with quality and effect of his idea.

The images in Lowell's poetry form an essential part of the rhythmic effect in a long stanza. Each image expands until it takes the utmost meaning that can be drawn from a series of intricate syntactical links* The ideas develop by what I call " syntactical extension," There is an initial state­ ment, perhaps a rephrasing, followed by an exploration or extension through some particular syntactic unit until each separate image fuses with all the others into a whole effect.

19 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (New York: 1955) , p , 32., 20 "Dr, Williams and Tradition , " Poetry. Cl (February 1963), p., 361, 51 A very brief example of this can be seen in line fifteen and

Continuing to line eighteen. The initial statement, "only the bones abide there.," is developed through three clauses all relating to the concept "where..." Each syntactical unit contains a single image or idea that is an extension of the preceding one. In fact the entire section is modelled on a highly complex rendering of this development* The initial statement^ "All you recovered from Poseidon / died with you, ray cousin*, *" is modified by tightly-linked extensions until the final refrain and sharp ending line. There was rebellion,, father, when the mock French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed Into your heirlooms, s creens , a glass- ca sed clock. The high-boy quaking to its toes . You damned My arm that cast your house upon your head And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull* East night the moon was full: I dreamed the dead Caught at my knees and fell: And i t w as w ell With me, my father* Then Behemoth and Leviathan Devoured our mighty merchants * None could arm Or put to sea*. O father, on my farm I added field to field And I have sealed An everlasting pact With Dives to contract The world that spreads in pains But the world spread When the clubbed flintlock broke my father's brain. 21

21 "Rebellion, " Lord Wearv1 s Castle , p. 29* 52 Lowell here proves how he is a poet of "happenings.." This 2.2 poem is structured like some of the poetry of the imagists^ a montage of separate verbal images tightly linked by stated or implied syntactical extensions. The short lines function as a type of syntactical counterpoint against the larger ones. The sentence structure itself is played against the varying 23 lengths of the lines, and the length of each syntactical unit is played against the lengths of the others. The idea is perfectly fitted to the rhythm and structure, o. .the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involve s the sould the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery,,.*.and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm, 24

Certain conclusions about the early verse of Robert Lowell may now be drawn: the short line is used both as a rhythmic and a syntactic counterpoint; the counterpointing of heavily stressed rhythms makes the longer poems move on a

22 The wide movement implied here bears a general relation to the movement of Cummings1 poetry, i.e ., ". „. Cummings w ill.. .withold the climax of a speech from view until the reader is prepared to receive its maximum impact, . , n E.E. Cummings; The Art of His Poetry (Baltimore: 1960), pp. 112-113. See also "16," 100 Selected Poems of e, e. cumminas (New York: 1923), p. 18.

23 See Ezra Pound's "Canto 1, " Modern Verse in English, (New York: 1958), pp. 256-258.

24 Suzanne Langer. Philosophy in a New Kev, (Cambridge, Mass.: 1947), pp. 260-61. 53 principle of relaxation and tension? and there is heavy

enjambement - most of his stanzas are constructed on the basis of a single running sentence« 11

Mr* Lowell, at his best and latest, is a dramatic poet; he presents peopletheir actions, their speeches, as they feel and look and sound to people; the poet's general­ izations are usually implied, and the poem's explicit generalizations are there primarily because they-are dramatically necessary - it is not usually the poet who means them* 1 As we have noted earlier, the change in Robert Lowell's poetry is noticeable, and though it doesn't necessarily call for a value judgment, the change is, as stated by Randall Jarrell above, a move towards a more dramatic line, If a central influence on Lowell's earlier poetry can be traced to Milton, the influences here will have to be the form of Robert Browning's "My Last

Duchess " and a combination of the tone in the opening lines of

T* S. Eliot's "Geronition"with that in much of the poetry of

Elizabeth Bishop ,

The most immediate difference is Lowell's move to 2 the couplet, used in a few earlier poems but never extensively.

This change to the couplet is essential for an understanding of Lowell's change in tones

I wanted something as fluent as prose; you wouldn't notice the form, yet looking back you'd find that great obstacles had been climbed* *,» once you've

1 "Robert Lowell's Poetry, " in Mid-Century American Poets, (l\fe..w York: 1950), p* .165* 2 Those seen in Lord Weary's Castle ares "The Drunken Fisherman," "Between the Porch and the Altar," "To Peter Taylor on the Feast of the Epiphany," "After Surprising Conversions,"

54 55 got your two lines to rhyme^ then that's done and you can go on to the next. You're not stuck with the whole stanza to round out. and build to a climax . A couplet can be a couplet or can be split and left as one line v or it can go on for a hundred lines? any sort of compression or expansion is po s s ible * 3 Even so, the essential change that takes place between the earlier poems and the later poems is in the line, itself*

“Love, is it trespassing to call them ours? I They are now. Once I trespassed - picking flowers

For keepsakes of my journey, once I bent Above your well, where lawn and battlement

Were trembling, yet without a flaw to mar Their sweet surrender. Ripples seemed to star

My face, the rocks, the bottom of the w ell,, » ,4 Though these lines are iambic pentameter, the counterpointed rhythm is a speech-rhythm, or a counterpointed four-stress line. The stresses do not janrt .therefore, the tension and release of the earlier poems is gone. In its place is a smooth texture,

The placement of the line-breaks differs slightly also.

They are much more frequent for one thing, and they seem to

c l u s t e r towards the middle of the lines rather than the ends. In

3 "An Interview with Robert Lowell/" p. 66,

4 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," p, 4* 56 the earlier poems f where the stanzas do not have many inter- j ect three—stress lines, the breaks are rhythmical or implied. In this later poetry, with the same type of stanza, the medial pauses are marked by punctuation — almost a caesura in the Elizabethan ' S sense*

She hears her husband, and she tries to call Him, then remembers* Burning stubble roars About the calendar on which she scores . The lady laughs. She shakes her parasol. The table rattles, and she chews her pearled. Once telescopic pencil, till its knife Snaps open* "Sol, " she whispers , laughing, "Sol, If you will help me, I will win the world." 6

The absence or presence of lines with a strong medial break acts as an effective counterpoint in its own right by accelerating or 7 slowing the speed of the line and the speed from line to line but without the resulting jamming of stresses and release of ten­ sion that controlled the movements of Lowell' s early lines* This

5 Sir Philip Sidney says that a caesura is a "breathing place in the middest of the verse. " An Apoloaie for Poetrie> G* Smith. Elizabethan Critcal Essavs, (Oxford; 1904), 2 vols., v. I, p. 205. John Ciardi says it "labels the internal pauses in a passage. It corresponds to a rest in music." How Does a Poem Mean? (Cambridge, M ass.; 1959), p. 293.

6 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," p . 5.

7 See Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? , pp. 926-928. 57 is effectively, seen here: "The blazings of the woodsman left a track Straight as an arrow to the blacksmith's shack Where I was born. There^ just a month before Our marriagef I can see you: we had dressed Ourselves in holly, and you cut your crest, A stump and green shoots on my father’s door. And swore our marriage would renew the cleft Forests and skulls of the Abnakis left Like saurian footprints by the lumber lord. Who broke their virgin greenness cord by cord To build his clearing* " 8 The movepient of the verse is controlled by the grammatical pauf es that seem to catch at the middle of the line *

The speed is controlled in yet another way* We saw in the early poems that the high incidence of near-rhyme and irregular rhyme allows the lines to run-over very quickly. Those poems of The Mills of the Kavanauqhs that employ the couplet have their performance pause (at the end of the line) heightened by the repeated sound*

The broken-winded yelp Of my Phoenician hounds, that fills the brush With snapping twigs and flying, cannot flush The ghost of Pallas* But I take his pall. Stiff with its gold and purple, and recall How Dido hugged it to her, while she toiled. Laughing — her golden threads, a serpent coiled In cypress, 9

The line s are able to move in three * s , from the la st rhyme of one couplet until the last rhyme of the next when the rhyme—sound is caught again* The function of the verb at the end of <- ;

8 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 11 p. 9 9 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," p. 7 58 an enjambed line is heightened; for a moment the reader is poised on the activity of the verb before he swings down into the next line.

There are only two poems in The Mills of the Kavanaucrhs that employ short lines with any amount of regularity. . The first one4 "David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden^" is divided into two parts, each three stanzas of twelve lines.

"The Fat Man in the Mirror" is six stanzas of five lines. In both of these the placement of the short lines is regular, and the reason for these lines has not changed radically since Lord Wearv*s Castle, but# I believe, in some instances has become subtle, They are still used here as rhythmic variation off a staple line but sometimes their rhythmic innovations are remarkable. The fountain's falling waters ring around The garden. "Love, if you had stayed my hand Uriah would not understand The lion's rush or why This stone-mouthed fountain laps us like a cat." 10

The break after "garden" in the second line generates a segment of tetrameter that is echoed in the next line and then assumed into as iambic movement again. This rhythm is thematically sound because of the love-exchange between the speakers. In "The Fat

Man in the Mirror" we have a similar situation.

10 pp. 41-42. 59 WhatIs filling up the mirror ? O t it is not 1; Hair-belly like a beaver*s house? An old dog's eye? The forenoon was blue In the mad King' s zoo Nurse was swinging me so high,, so high! 11

The feeling of madness, frenzied hilarity, is established by the sudden shift in rhythm in those two-stress lines » The line-breaks in the first two lines after "mirror" and "house" set up a rhythm that is echoed in "so high, so high" and heightened by the sudden

shock of the two short lines? in fact, both the rhythm and the rhyme generate a kind of modulated limerick*.

The final instance of a change within the line is the 12 tendency to use nine-syllable lines and dots ( .* „ ) within the lines* Both of these show an interpretation of the verse-line as . less a syllabic unit and more an extension into time* This does not mean that all the lines are becoming irregular or free, but it does indicate that less emphasis is being placed on syllabic determination* You grim aced, bared Your chest, and bellowed, "Listen, undeclared War seems to * * * static * * * the United States And Honolulu are at war . "13

11 p . 47.

12 See "The Fat Man in the Mirror, "

13 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs, ” p. 11. 60 Lines similar to these are never seen in poems before The Mills of the Kavanauahs; and even though these lines

maintain their syllabic regularity/ their rhythmic effect is changed„ .

As we noted earlier in the chapter, the syntactical progression of most of the poems in Lord Weary1 s Castle and

Land of Unlikeness moves through clausal and phrasal exten­

sion* This is possible in those poems because they have

been constructed as verse^paragraphs * Not many of the poems in this volume develop in that way* Most of them are too long .

to handle any sustained movement ("Mother Marie Therese") and

others seem to move through illogical, personal association rather than syntactical or logical progression* The children splash and paddle. Then, hand in hand. They duck for turtles« Where she cannot stand, ! The whirlpool sucks here * She has set her teeth Into his thumb* She wrestles underneath The sea-green smother; stunned, unstrung and torn Into a thousand globules by that horn Or Whorl of river, she has burst apart Like churning water on her husband’s heart- A horny thumbnail I Then they lie beside The marble goddess. "Look, the stony-eyed Persephone has mouldered like a leaf I" The children whisper* Old and pedes tailed. Where rock-pools used to echo when she called Demeter - sheathed in Lincoln green, a sheaf - The statue of Persephone regards The river, while it moils a hundred yards****14*

14 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs, " p„ 6* 61

Certain parts of this stanza are syntactical, but most of it is a series of jumps from one image to another. One image or

thought is exhausted; there is an abrupt break (syntactical);

then a jumptto another image . Instead of rounding one thought t these stanzas become emotional "still-shots,"

A variation on the development by association is seen in those stanzas that use repetition as the main device ~ rhythmid, semantic, and syntactic* "Sleep, sleep, ’ 1 hushed you* ‘Sleep, You must abide The lamentations of the inuptial mass - Then you are rising. Then you are alive; The bridesmaids scatter daisies , and the bride, A daisy choired by daisie s, sings; "My life Is like a horn of plenty gone to grass. Or like the yellow bee-^queen in her hive, " She whispers, "Who is this, and who is this? His eyes are coals» His breath is myrrh; his kiss. The consummation of the silvered glass,1 "15 The rhythms here are controlled by the repetition of the words and phrases and by the repetition of the syntactical units; the movement is irregular* The passage engenders a feeling similar to that produced by some of Eliot' s lines; And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Ho I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair**** 16

1.5 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs, " p. 17* 16 "The Love Song of J* Alfred Prufrock," in T. S. Eliot The Complete Poems and Piavs 1909-1950 (New Yorks 1952) , p . 5* There are other similarities between Eliot's four-stress line and Lowell's counterpointed one * See Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S* Eliot (Londons 1949), pp* 1-35» 62

At the end of three volumes of poetryz Robert Lowell

has moved from borrowed forms m rhetorical construction, and a jammed line to a general form^ a less obvious rhetoric/ and a line counterpointed by speech rhythms. V Patterns of Sound

Rime has had a long reign, and still flourishes, and it is in English one of the chief metrical Factors» Like a low-born upstart it has even sought to establish its kinship with the ancient family of rhythm by incorporating the aristocratic h. and_y into its name* As it distinguishes verses that have not other distinction its disposition determines stanza-forms, etc.? and for this reason it usurps a prominence for which it is illsuited. 1

This attitude towards rhyme is one that has persisted 2 since the middle of the 16th century and is still maintained today in the practice of poetry if not in actual diatribe. Even so, many modern poets, use rhyme * Lowell's interest in rhyme and all its variants is intense * There has scarcely been a poem written by him that has not consciously used some form of it*

The first type of rhyme used by Lowell, and what most people normally understand as rhyme, has been described this way: In English verse, two words which rhyme must always have? the initial con sonant-sounds dif­ ferent. and all the sounds following these initial ones alike - whether vowel-sounds, or both vowel and consonant-sounds, 3

1 Robert Bridges, "A Letter to a Musician on English Prosody,11 included in Collected Essays (London: 1933), .vol2, p. 78*

2 Sir Philip Sidney calls it "not only*. * superfluous but also absurd* " Observation in the Art of English Poesie. included in Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: 1904) , vol.I, p* 159. 3 Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse, (New York: 1909), p. 284. 63 64 4 This is perfect rhyme, what Sidney Lanier called "a rule," and Lowell has used It in all his first three volumes, As we have seen before> his end-rhyme schemes vary from alternating rhyme, couplets, and quatrains (abba) to practices that could 5 only be called irregular. We discussed briefly the use of perfect rhyme in the last chapter* It can be said to have at least three major functions? merely to give pleasure by sound repetition^ to signal a metrical pause# and to organize stanzas or groups of lines * A fourth function given to rhyme has been semantic; in some pe'culiar way it is supposed to link the 6 meanings of the words as well.

We have a lr e a d y noted Lowell's use of perfect rhyme at the end of the line* He also uses it in the middle: What a whirl Of Easter eggs is colored by the lights As the Norwegian dancer's crystalled tights Flash with her naked leg's high-booted skate, Likb Northern lights upon my watching plate , 7

Lowell is using rhymed couplets here, and the internal perfect rhyme functions to draw attention away from the line ending»

4 Ibid, , p. 284, 5 The rhyme scheme of the first two stanzas of "Thanks­ giving's Over" is: 1 - aabbcbbcceeeeffggehh; 2 - abcaaccbddbefagh hdabihjjj» 6 See W* K* Wimsatt# "One Relation of Rhyme t© Reason# " Modern Language Quarterly, V (1944), pp. 323-338. 7 "Between the Porch and the Altar# " Lord Wearv's Castle, . P, 45, 65 Perfect rhyme, however, is only one of the seven 8 type listed by Louis Untermeyer; and Robert Lowell uses

all these in his poetry, sometimes with euphonic brilliance, sometimes with heavy-handed clumsiness.

The first of Untermeyer's variety of near-rhymes is assonance. This occurs when identical vowel-sounds are preceded and followed by unlike consonants, as in "hid" and

"pin*" It is this type of rhyme that Lowell uses to avoid the monotony of consistent end-rhymes and to allow a variety of

rhyme that can be carried on at great length. Normally it is

seen in poems using alternating or coupling perfect rhime. In these, most of them towards the end of Lord Weary's Castle and all through The Mills of the Kavanauahs, the

assonantal rhyme cuts across the perfect.rhyme: "Then yellow water, and the summer's drought Boiled on its surface underneath our grounds' Disordered towzle* Wish m'v> Wish, mv wish, Said the dry flies snapping past my ears to whip Those dead-horse waters, faster than a fish* 9 Assonantal rhyme appears in the first two lines? the alternating

lines that follow are probably what Lowell means when, he says

8 For other treatment of this see T. Walter Herbert, "Near-Rimes and Paraphones, " Sewanee Review, XLV (October- December 1937), pp. 437-439.

9 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs, " p. 9. 66 the " a couplet can be a couplet or can be split and left as one line*, or it can go on for a hundred lines? any sort of 10 compression or expansion is possible." And* as a rule, most of Lowell’s end-rhymes are perfect rhymes? even though 11 he has to break the running of his couplets and use identical rhymes to do so: "Anne* " he teases* "Anne* my whole House is your serf. The squirrell in its hole Who hears your patter.* Anne * and sinks its eye- Teeth* bigger than a human’s* in its treasure of rotten shells* is wiser far than I.,.." 12

.The final type of end-rhyme that Lowell uses to off-set or substitute for his perfect rhyme is suspended rhyme* sometimes called false rhyme. In suspended rhyme the final consonant-sounds are identical but the vowel-sounds and preceding consonant sounds * if any? are different* as in "ample" and "temple." Sometimes the final consonant sounds are similar but not identical* as in "done" 13 and "long. " The children whisper* Old and pedestailed* Where rock-pools used to echo when she called, 14

10 "An Interview with Robert Lowell* " p. 66*

11 Henry Lanz says that identical rhymes are "unsatis­ factory from an acoustic point of view ." The Physical Basis of Rhvme (London: 1931) * pp. 100-101,

12 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs*" p. 7.

13 Ibid.* p. 6.

14 "The Mills of the Eavarihughs*” p. 6. 67

Though Lowell uses these near-rhyme exceptions we have noted for end-rhyme , we must remark that they are not used very often» For a poet who uses rhyme extensively, Lowell is probably one of the few poets today who can use near-rhyme as little as he does. His ability to rhyme allows him to surmount any difficulties a short stanza form might pose, and so in his early poetry the incidence of near-rhyme is very slight. In his later poetry when the stanzas are getting longer, or in the early poetry when he is using a long stanza, he will disrupt a formal rhyme scheme rather than use near-rhyme. Here they used to build a fire to broil their trout. A beer can filled with fishskins marks the dingle where they died. They whisper, "Touch her. If her foot should slide a little earthward, Styx will hold her down Nella miseria, smashed her to plaster, balled Into the whirlpool Is boil." Here bubbles filled Their basin, and the children splashed. They died In Adam, while the grass snake slid appalled To summer, while Jehovah1 s grass-green lyre Was rustling all about them in the leaves That gurgled by them turning upside down) The time of marriage! - worming on all fours Up slag and deadfall, while the torrent pours Down, down, down, down, and she, a crested bird, Or, Rainbow, hovers, le st the thunder-word.... 15

Here Lowell has rhymed "died," "down,” and "filled" twice; "leaves" and "lyre ” have no rhyme-mates except through near­ rhyme .

15 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," p. 7. 68 End-rhyme is only one small area of sound In Lowell's poetry, however* There is an intensive structure of vowel- sound within the line all through his poetry* Henry Lanz says that assonance may be used in a. "harmonic" way * Popular conception identifies, musical harmony with the simultaneous coexistence of various tones which produce a pleasurable effect* This, however, is a very superficial definition* For technically the term "harmony" applies to the relation among various chords, rather than to a mere coexistence of sounds* A sequence of chords may be harmonious or disharmonious according to whether or not it follows certain rules of modulation, progression, and composition* 16 Though this statement,certainly has not been accepted blandly by 17 poets and prosodists, Lanz is the only aesthetician who has gone into this subject at length* He has found no reason why a 18 succession of vowel sounds may not have an aesthetic.value*

Begardless of any purely aesthetic function, vowel- sound s may function in a section of verse by dominating the rhythmic movements through repetition, either the repetition of 19 a single vowel-sound or repetition of groups of vowel-sounds»

16 The Physical Basis of Rhvme t. p* 250* 17 Bridges says that "there is, in fact, a constance irremediable deficiency in this merely phonetic beauty, * * " in "Letter to a Musician on English Prosody," p* 76*

18 p o 31 * 19 See Lanz , p * 29* He deals with the same thing here, 69

In this way> perhaps^ it may he said .to set up something similar to a "harmonic" structure.

Wallowing in this bloody sty* 1 2 3 1 cast for fish that pleased my eye . 1 2 3 (Truly; Jehovah's bow suspends 3. 2 1 No pots of gold to weight its ends)1 1 2 3 Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout 2 3 Rose to my bait. They flopped about 2 1 1 My canvas creel until the moth 1 3 Corrupted its unstable cloth. 20 2 3

Besides the fact that these three repeated vowel sounds set up a rhythmic and tonal repetition at the beginning of the first three lines* as single vowel sounds they produce a line of repetition that binds the texture of the verse. The "ow" sound in "wallowing” in "bow," "-mouthed, " and "gold" to name a few examples. The "wa" sound of "wallowing" links with "about," "pots," and "canvas.” The same holds true of the "ing" sound. If we include the sound of the vowel in

"sty," the first line contains a compressed sound pattern that

controls the phonetic quality of the entire stanza*

20 Lord Weary1 s Castle» p. 31 . Vow#£-sounds can also be rhetorically arranged according to what Kenneth Burke calls “chiasmus," a crossing of vowels or consonants that results in an a-b-b-a arrangement» Consonantal chiasmus is really a type of alliteration and will be covered later in this chapter# Though Lowell uses strict tonal chiasmus rarely in his later poetry* it is found in his tightly structured and obviously rhetorical early poems Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary*s Castle. In "The Exile's Return" there are two examples, The first is the relatively simple 22 "rigor mortis "j this produces a^b^b-a# The second example is a little more complicated! 23 De/Ville* whjyre braced pig-/irQp. dragons grip

The first half of this line is . simple two-tone chiasmus* but the second line employs three tones and uses a single tone as a pivSt for the other two to swing around.

The first type of ^consonance treated by Untermeyer is listed as dissonance or rhymed consonants:

21 "On Musicality in Verse, " Poetry» LVII (October 1940 - March 1941) , p . 34# 22 Lord Weary" s Castle. p, 3#

23 Lord Weary's Castle # p. 3« 71 It Is the exact opposite of rhyme, Here both preceding and following consonants are Identical# but the vowel sound is unmatching, "Read-rude," "blood-blade, " "grown-green" are examples of dissonance* 24

As with assonantal rhyme, Lowell uses consonantal rhyme to vary his perfect end-rhymes; but he also uses it internally in what Burke calls the ablaut form or the changing of vowels 25 within a consonantal frame»

* **and winter, spring and summer# guns unlimber and lumber down the narrow gabled street**,, 26

Such obviously rhetorical devices as this are fairly limited to

Lowell's earlier poetry*

What Untermeyer calls consonance is actually a form of alliteration# but the common definition rigidly applied to alliteration is Untermeyer*s: Alliteration occurs where the initial vowel- sound s or consonant-sounds of two or more consecutive or near accented syllable are the same* In perfect rhyme these initial sounds are necessarily different? and to this extent alliteration is the counterpart of rhyme, 27

As we noted in earlier chaptersLowell uses the alliteration of initial syllables to point up his counterpointed four-stress lines* As practiced by modern poets# however# alliteration is not

24 "Rhyme and Its Reasons#" Saturday Review of Literature. IX (August 1932), p» 30*

25 "On Musicality in Verse#" p* 37* 26 Lord Weary1 s Castle f. p , 3 * 27 "Rhyme and Its Reasons, " p, 30* 72 limited to accented syllables or to initial sounds* Untermeyer gives as an example of ”concealed alliteration" the ”v" sounds 28 in "groves"and "ever*" Lowell uses this type of alliteration as a constant practice along with the alliteration of initial

consonants: I walk upon the flood: My way is wayward; there is no way out; Now how the weary waters swell., — The tree is down in blood! All the bats of Babel flap about The rising sun of hell . 29

The alliteration is very prominent here * Perhaps for a thematic

reason, but the later poetry of Lowell doe s not show this extreme; the alliteration blends to the movement of the line:

The lady sees, the statutes in the pool* She dreams.and thinks, "My husband was. a fool...30

He also uses it in long passages:

The farmer sizzle^, on his shaft, all day* 1 1 1 1 2 He is. content.and centuries, away 12 2 1 2 1 From white-hot. Concord, and he stands on guard 2 2 12 1 Or is he melting down like .sculptured lard ? 1 2 1 2 His hand is. crisp and steady on the plough. 31 1 1 1 12

28 I b id ., p . 30* 29 "The Slough of Despondr 11 Lord Wearv's Castle. p„ 62.

30 "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," p. 4*

31 "Lord Wearv* s Castle * p. 42* 73

Lowell works with patterns of alliteration that are much more intricate than this, however, Kenneth Burke:. speaks of what he calls an "acrostic” structure: We may next note an acrostic structure for getting consistency with variation. In "tyrrannous and strong f" for instance, the consonant structure of the third word is but the rearrangement of the consonant structure in the first, 32 As an example he shows that Coleridge's "damsel with a 33 dulcimer" is a matching of d.-m-s_-l_wlth d-lrsrm - plusjr.

This explains the peculiar effect of. some of the phrases that 34 Lowell uses like: "Dishonor/on a sword" which is

with jv-jir w "21SU Burke also introduces two more terms that deal with consonantal arrangement: "augmentation11 and "diminution,"

ThuSf if. a theme has been established in quarter-notes> the composer may treat it by augmentation by repeating it in half­ notes, And diminution is the reverse of this process. In poetry then., you could get the effect of augmentation by first giving two consonants in juxtaposition and then repeating them in the same order but separated by the length of a vowel, 35

32 p. 34,

33 Ibid.

34 "The Mills of the Kayanaughs," p. 12,

35 "On Musicality in Verse, " p. 35, 74 This has the effect of alliteration without any of the 36 obvious signs: "You let a slut whose body sold*... » 11

This is an example of augmentation, with the "s" and the Jll" of ”slut" separated by a vowel* Up to a point, the more carefully the distance between the two is controlled the subtler the alliteration! "Where morning stars .sing out. 37 together"

Lowell's use of all the consonantal features in conjunction is similar to his use of the assonantal features; they provide a texture for an entire passage:

A belU 5 Grumbles, when the reverberations. strip 1 5 3 4 1 1 1 4 3 341 The -thatching from its spire, 4 4 42 1 43 3 1 The search-auns click and spit and split u p timber • 4 3 12 3 25 3 3 4 3 5 4 4 1 And nick the slate roofs, on the Hofstenwall 2 4 35 4 1 3 4 532 Where torn-up tile stones crown the victor. 38 1 41 4 5 $4 .: 3 21 4 • 24 1 This is a movement that is kept up throughout the entire poem and linked with the obvious "i" sounds becomes an entire background of sound.

36 "The Ghost,” Lord Weary1 s Castlef P, 51 * 37 "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," p. 12.

38 "The Exile's Return, " Lord Weary's Castle, p. 3, 75 Consonan.ee is a key figure in any study of Lowell,

It is one of the ways in which we can differentiate between his earlier and later verses. In a study of Spenser and

Milton, Ants Oras discovered two diametrically opposed tendencies:! Spenser loves to place his consonant clusters at the beginning, as in plain;., whereas Milton prefers them at the end, as In first. The vowels in Milton, rather more often than in Spenser, are preceded only by single consonants or by no consonants at all* In Spenser, on the contrary, the tendency is to avoid anything heavier than a single consonant after the stressed vowel, which, of course, makes the vowel element more con­ spicuous* 39 Though it is dangerous to draw any meaningfull conclusions from this statement; one obvious difference between the early and later Lowell Is a shift from clustered consonants at the ends of words, to a lack of clustering. Even a haphazard checks shows this: Here corpse and soul go bare „ The Leader's headpiece Capers to his imagination*s tumblings; The Party barks at is unsteady fledglings To goose-step in red-tape, and microphones Sow the four winds with babble » 40

Words like "babble," "corpse," and "tumblings” have consonants clustered near the end of the word rather than the beginning. In

"Mother Marie Therese” the situation is different:

39 "Spenser and Milton. ” in Sound and Poetry (Mew York: 1957), pp. 11-112. 40 "Cistercians in Germany." Land of Unlikeness. 76 If she hears at all. She only hears it tolling to this shore 4 Where our frost-bitten sisters, know the roar Of water, inching, always on the move For virgins, when they wish the times were love. And their hysterical hosannahs rouse The loveless harems* ». w 41 If there is a tendency to cluster here, it is more towards the beginnings of the words than the ends„

A final note about Lowell1 s use of sound that I wish to mention is its possible relation to meaning. In one sense, we have seen it used to support meaning. In the last chapter we noted that in a stanza from "The Fat Man in the Mirror, " the hysterical imbalance was emphasized by a rhythmical im balance:

What's filling up the mirror? O, it is not I; Hair-belly like a beaver's house: an old dog's eye 7 The forenoon was blue In the mad King's zoo Nurse was swinging me so high, so high! 42

The polarity of sound emphasized in this stanza by the immediate shift of the long "i" sound to the ”oo" sound underlines the feature of tension, the giddy swing in mood. We see the same feature again in an earlier poem:

41 The Mills of the Kavanauahs, p. 38,

42 Ibid. , p. 47. 77 Our Lady of Babylon, go by^ go by, . I was once the apple of your eye; Flies, flies are on the plane tree, on. the streets*43

Again we have the r e p e a t e d "i" sound., the same cadence of "The Fat Man in the Mirror," and the same heightened hysteria„ Craig La Driere seems to hold a similar position with relation to sound:

Quantity or intensity in xsound has its analogue in intensity in meaning, which may therefore be thought of as quantitative (though we are far at present from the prospect of applying measurement to it}; and the relation of emphasis in the sense to stre s s in the sound is the best corraboration of the hypothesis 1 have suggested* 44 The sound structures treated in this chapter become progressively less dominant as Lowell's work proceeds. The obvious alliteration of his earlier poems is made more subtle in The Mills of the Kavanauahs.. The clustering enclitics even out. In their place we are left with more subtle patterns of 45 assonance and consonance, blending and concealed alliteration.

43 "As a Plane Tree by the W ater," Lord Weary's Castle . p , 47.

44 "Structure, Sound , and Meaning," in Sound and Poetry, p, 105. 45 The subtlety of the alliterative patterns in Lowell may be viewed, as Kenneth Burke does, as alliteration of cognates. As Burke shows, ”n" moves into a voiced or voice­ less "d" and "t”, while "m" moves into a voiced or voiceless "b" or "p"; Lowell's verse surely exhibits this. "On Musicality in Verse," pp. 31-40, 78 The question whether Lowell uses these consciously or not does not really make much difference. Nor is it necessary to draw a relation between the change from dominant alliterative and consonant patterns to a more muted form and the change in Lowell's dominant ideas* Certainly he is aware of what is going on in his. verse but it is not necessarily the kind of awareness that one can catalogue or analyze„ The first kind may be an unconscious use of the sound, while the second is a methodology. There is no evidence that Lowell's sound patterns are the result of such a methodology. In Life Studies Mr , Lowell has exchanged the style of El Greco for drypoint, 1

VI Life Studies

Life Studies, is a compression and mutation of all the earlier prosodic technique , style , and tone of Robert Lowell*

It is a statement of a noetic as much as it is a probing of per­ sonal lives*

The first section of the book, co n sists of four poems that display thematic and structural similarities to the early Lowell* The meters are traditional? the counterpointing is the trochaic and dactylic rhythm of Hopkins running against the iambic line * The style is, perhaps, not as grand and rhetorical in this first section as Land of Unlikeness, nor the thematic tension so noticeable# still the similarity is apparent*

"Beyond the Alps, " the first poem in this volume, is set in three stanzas of fourteen lines and uses irregularly rhymed 2 ' iambic pentameter* The religious imagery of this section displays

1 Daniel G* Hoffman, "Arrivals and Rebirths," Sewanee Review , LXVIII (1960) , p- 130 *

2 The first Stanza is rhymed abaccdbdeffgge *

79 80 the same ambiguity noted in the imagery of Land of Unlikeness and Lord Wearv's Castle.

Who could understand ? Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter's brazen sandal» The Duce's lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke God herded his people to the c o u p de grace - The costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push 0 Pius, through the monstrous human crush 3 All the elements of the early poetry are here: the brutal secular authority of Mussolini; the God of power and destruction, Jehovah, as shown in "herded" and the ambiguity of ” c o u p de g race": and the obvious broad criticism of humanity in "the monstrous human crush,. =" Even Rome as the thematic center of the poem is not that far from the Rome of "Dea Roma": Much against my will 1 left the City of God where it belongs. There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled the eagle of Caesar«, He was one of us only, pure prose. 4

The second poem in this section, "The Banker’s Daughter , " is similar in tone to the later poems in Lord Wearv's

Castle like "Charles the Fifth and the Peasant." The style is

3 Life Studies» p . 4«.

4 p . 3 * 81 dramatic and. diction colloquial:

Once this poor country egg from Florence lay at her accouchement, such a virtuous ton of woman only women thought her one. King Henry pirouetted on his heel and jested, ''Look^ my cow1 s producing veal," 5 The same is true of “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich,” although the tone here reflects the hysteria of "The Fat Man in the

M irror”: "We're all American, except the Doc, a Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye* The boys who floored me, two black maniacs, try to pay my hands . Rounds, rounds! Why punch the clock ? 6

The other poem in this section, set in the old formal style of Lord Weary's Castle, complains: The snow had buried Stuyvesant. The subways drummed the vaults „ I heard the El's green girders charge on Third, Manhattan's truss of adamant, that groaned in ermine, slummed on want, * „, Cyclonic zero of the word, . God of our armies, who interred Gold Harbor1 s blue immortals. Grant! Horseman, your sword is in the groove! 7

The second section of this volume contains thirty-six pages of prose, an autobiographical sketch of Lowell's early life*

It is not essential to any prosodic understanding of Lowell, but provides a background for the later poems that deal with subjects from Lowell's past.

5 p »■ 5 * 6 p . 8.

7 "Inauguration Day: January 1953, " p . 7. 82

The third section presents biographical sketches of four literary figure si Ford Madox Ford, George Santayana < Delmore Schwartz , and Hart Crane , Here we can see the lines starting to break! O divorced, divorced

from the whale-fat of post-war London! Boomed, cut, plucked and booted 1 In Provence , New York , „«

marrying, blowing *** nearly dying at Boulder, when the altitude

x j i pressed the world on your heart, and your audience, almost football size, shrank to a dozen, „ , 8 The beginning lines of this section are counterpointed in the style of Hopkins, but the later lines show an increasing, irregular strain. The rhymes of this section alternate between perfect: rhyme and near-rhyme, The break is even more notice­ able in the second poem* In the heydays of 4 forty-five ,

bus-loads of souvenir-deranged j X a % j G .1 and officer-professors of philosophy

came crashing through your cell, puzzled to find you still alive,*** 9

The second line here has fourteen syllables, but the other lines

8 "Ford Madox Ford," p, 49* 9 "For George Santayana: 1863-1952," p» 51 do not come near violating an iambic norm* Also the inter- jection of three and four-stress lines is increasing» In the next poem the lines become even less regular:

from Malta - his eyes lost in fleshy lips baked and black* Your tiger kitten. Oranges, cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls * You said: "We poets in our youth begin in sadness: thereof in the end come despondency and madness: Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages! " The Charles River was turning silver„ In the ebb- light of morning, we stuck the duck - ‘s w eb- foot, like a candle , in a quart of gin we'd killed „ 10 Yet even with the breaking of the lines here, the rhyme is retained, though a great deal of it is near-rhyme = The staple line of this poem continues to be iambic pentameter* These lines constitute a variant from the pentameter* They do, however, lead directly into the fourth section of the book*

In this section the verse is "free":

"I won’t go with you * I want to stay with Grandpa!" That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father* s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner* * * * Fontainebleau,,. M attapoisett, Puget Sound. * „ * Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather's farm, 11

10 "To Delmore Schwartz, ” pg*. 54*

11 "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Deverems Winslow, " p, 59, 84 The reason for the change is clearly stated. I began to have a certain disrespect for the tight forms. If you could make it easier by adding syllables f why not ? And then when I was writing Life Studies, a good number of the poems were started in very strict meter, and I found that, more than the rhymes, the regular beat was what I didn't want. 12 The result of Lowellls change to a free form is lines based on a purely accentual count: My grandfather found

I I I his grandchild s fogbound solititudes

I 4 I sweeter than human society. 13 We noted in the early development of Robert Lowell's line that the counterpointing changed from a running rhythm (or rhythm produced by substitution) to the counterpointing of speech rhythm s. By the time I came to Life Studies I'd been writing my autobiography and also writing poems that broke meter. I'd been doing a lot of reading aloud. I went to the We st Coast and read at least once a day and sometimes twice for fourteen days, and more and more I found that I was simplifying my poems. 14 The further development, removing any metrical basis for those speech rhythms, is a point in a development that has been going on

. 12 "An Interview with Robert Lowell,11 p. 67 ,

13 "Dunbarton," p. 65.

14 "An Interview with Robert Lowell, " pp. 66-67. 85 since Land of Unlike ness. The line of The Mills of the Kavananahs

was partially the result of four stresses oounterpointed on a metrical frame of iambic pentameter * If the pentameter is removed and the stresses remain* the result is a form of free verse based

on the number of accents to a line»- The principle of order* if

any* is not purely the number of stresses to a line* however. But by looking at longer sections of this late poetry we can see a principle of order emerging.

Yvor Winters writes that his free verse foot consists, of one heavily accented syllable* and unlimited number of unaccented syllables * and an unlimited number of syllables with secondary accent. This resembles the accentual meter of Hopkins * except Hopkins employed rhym e, 15

The difference between the foot of Winters and the foot of Lowell is that Lowell seems to exercise more control:

He was my Father* I was his son,

J: '%! X On our yearly autumn get-aways from Boston

to the family graveyard in Dunbarton* he took the wheel himself - like an admiral at the helm, Freed from Karl and chuckling over the gas he was saving* I' ■ 4: he let his motor roller-coaster

out of control down each hill.

15 In Defense of Reason, p* 112, 86 I I 1 We stopped atlthe Priscilla in Nashua

l X for brownies and root-beer, and later "pumped ship" together in the Indian Summer, * ,16 The scansion here is my own and certainly liable to error; but any scansion of verse such as this must take into consideration the fact that a syllable is accented according to its position in the line and, even more important, if the unit of the line (or part of the line) is a phrase or clause "the primary stress. , .will come as 17 near the end as possible.. ."

In this section, though it appears there is no principle of organization, the lines have a norm from which they deviate and to which they return. The staple line in this passage is a three- stress line with a two-stress line admitted as a variant. The five-stress line (the sixth) is three and a two-stress line run together. The principle of order stated here is followed by most of the poetry in Life Studies.

16 "Dunbarton,11 p. 65. The secondary stresses are not marked because they do not figure strongly in the determination of the line. 17 John Thompson. The Foundation of English Metre. (London; 1961), p. 12. 87 The second principle of organization in this poetry is the use of alliteration to key stressed syllables or words*

This is a distinct carry-over from earlier poetry in which it was used extensively to m^rk the counterpointed four-stress lineo It can be used freely as running alliteration:

x , i In my Father! s bedroom:

1 4' blue threads as thin t • i as pen-writing on the bedspread, blue dots on the curtains, a blue kimono,

4- 4; I Chinese sandals with blue plush straps-.

the broad' j . planked floor. 4 i i had a s.andpapered neatness» 18

The alliteration may be frontal as in the second line „ It may be amalliteration of cognates ("p" and "b") as in the third line.

Or it may be "buried" alliteration like the seventh line. All these ways of using alliteration are established practices in the earlier poetry.

The third way the line is controlled Is through rhyme:

There were no undesirables or girls in mv set, when I was a boy at Mattapoisett — only Mother, still her father's daughter* Her voice was still electric with a hysterical, unmarried panic, when she read to me from the Napoleon book.

18 "Father's Bedroom," p, 75, 88 Long-nosed Marie Louise Hapsburg in the frontispiece had a downright Boston bashfulness, where she grovelled to Bonaparte, who scratched his navel, and bolted his food - just ray seven years tall! 19

I have merely indicated the obvious rhyme here. Its function ’ is to guide the movement of the free-ranging stresses by strongly signalling the end of the line. But it can also bind the inner movements of the verse, keying stresses through assonance. I I Ready, afraid I J I of living alone til eighty, 1 I I 1 Mother mooned in a window, J I as if she had stayed on a train 2 2 4 I one stop past her destination. 20 3 3

The assonantal rhyme here may either key the stresses exactly, as in the fourth line . Or indicate the area where the stress will

fall, as in the second line.

The major controlling factor, however, is what has had major significance in all his verse - syntax. We noted earlier that he has a tendency (in the earlier poetry) to stop a line on or near a verb. In his latest poetry this has become a basic principle of construction, but in a slightly different way

than it is seen in the earlier volumes.

19 "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow, " p. 62. 20 "Commander Lowell, " p. 70 , 89 The night attendant# a B, U , sophomore, rouses from the mare1 s nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning„ He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker . Grows maunder on the petrified fairway* Absence! My heart grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill . (This is the house for the "mentally ill. ") 21

Every line of this stanza (except the eighth) is end^stopped on a period, the syntactical close of an idea, or the subject of a verb with the following line completing the sentence, Charles Hockett says that the "kernel" of an English sentence is a predicative constitute:

The most general characterization of predicative constructions is suggested by the terms "topic" and " comment" for their ICS: the speaker announces a topic and then says something about it. Thus Tohn/ran away: that new book bv Thomas Guernsey/ I haven't read vet, 22

The lines of the stanza above that are not complete sentence units are constructed according to the basic, syntactical structure topic^comment* Stanzas like these are raally formed like

Lowell' s conception of the function a rhymed couplet has:

",**a couplet can be a couplet or can be split and left as one 23 line o.o*.

21 "Waking in the Blue," p. 81,

22 A Course in Modern Linguistics (Hew York: 1958), p , 195, 23 "An Interview with Robert Lowell," p. 66. 90 A line is either a complete unit (i.e ., "Left as one line") or it is "split" into topic and comment. The rest of this quote gives us a key to the variants of this principle: ",, . or it can go on for a hundred lines; any sort of compression or expansion is 24 possible. ” If Lowell were speaking of the basic constituents of an English sentence here, the couplet would be topic-comment, The single line would be a single sentence, or conjunction'of topic and comment. Expansion could take place if either of these were split into smaller units, but never breaking the topic-comment relation. What use is my sense of humor ? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap, worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbet and gingerale - more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's: the hooded lights bring out "Bobbie, " Porcellian '29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig - redolent and roly-poly as a sperm-whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs . 25

24 "An Interview with Robert Lowell," p. 66. 25 "Waking in the Blue, ” pp. 81-82. 91 This is very similar to the construction of "The Quaker Grave­ yard in Nantucket" ~ phrasal and clausal extension* Each line corresponds to some syntactical unit and most of these smaller units work on the same principle as the larger: "a replica of Louis XVI" (topic)./without the wig" (comment) „

This also seems very close to what Robert Bridges defines as M> Dujardin's free verse* .». *so (a) a line of free verse is a grammatical unit, made of accentual verbal units combining to a rhythmical import^ complete in itself and sufficient In itself; (b) the line may be various in length, and of any length# only not too long; (c) the line is absolutely indifferent to syllabic numeration or construction apart from its own propriety of sense-and pleasant movement; (d) and* * .free from all metrical obligations. .. 26

The basic structural unit for Lowell is the sentence and the lines are not only counterpointed against each other (not strhotly counterpoint) through their rhythms but also through the variations of sense that each different syntactical unit expresses. The sen­ tences are long and fragmentary when broken and the reader moves through them quickly, forced to pause only because the lines are syntactical. The images are fragments, placed one against the other by syntax and form a linear mosaic that works with the same rhythmic subtlety that we have seen in "The Quaker Grave­ yard in Nantucket*"

26 "Hundrum & Hamm Scarum: A Lecture on Free Verse#" in Collected Essays and Papers, (Oxford: 1928), v. 2, pp. 42-43. 92 Lowell's prosodic development from highly traditional forms and tight structures leads directly to this present poetry* The difference between each of his volumes becomes not an abandonment of principle^ necessarily^ but a greater amount of emphasis put on one particular method rather than another*

In Land of Unlikeness it is stanza form/ in Lord Weary*s Castle a counterpointed trochaic rhythm with short line s f in The1 Mills of the Kavanauahs a counterpointed four-stress rhythm, in

Life Studies a stress rhythm. There is logical progression.

Just where Robert Lowell will go from here is uncertain* J don't think that a personal history can go on forever/ unless you're Walt Whitman and have a way with you* That doesn't mean I won't do more of it, but I don't want to do more now, I feel I haven" t gotten down all my experience, or perhaps even the most important part, but I've said all I really have much inspiration to say, and more would just dilute, So that you need something more impersonal, and other things being equal it's better to get your emotions out in a Macbeth than in a confession* Macbeth must have tons of Shakespeare in him. We don't know where, nothing in Shakespeare's life was remotely like Macbeth, yet he somehow gives the feeling of going to the core of Shakespeare, You have much more freedom that way than you do when you write an autobiographical poem, 27.

27 "An Interview with Robert Lowell," pp. 70-71, BIBLIOGRAPHY

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