“Everyone’s tired of my turmoil…..These things come on with a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of “enthusiasm”, one becomes a kind of man-aping balloon in a parade – then you subside and eat bitter coffee-grounds of dullness, guilt etc.” Lowell wrote:
“I became sorely aware of how few poems I had written, and that these few had been finished at the latest three or four years earlier. Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden and willfully difficult…I felt my old poems hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humorless and even impenetrable surface….I was reading what I no longer felt.I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert.’
‘Prose is less cut off from life than poetry is…I couldn’t get my experience into tight metrical forms.”: : In a correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop he admitted being influenced by her poem Armadillo, which he ‘replied to’ by writing Skunk Hour, a classic Lowell poem. He admitted,” The dedication is to Elizabeth Bishop, because re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner.” : : Lowell wrote in his confessional free flowing poems, as a sort of self-help therapy. His poems are attempts to understand how to survive in the world, how to mix fact & fiction : : : : Robert Lowell underwent treatment for manic attacks, a symptom of his bipolar disorder (schizophrenia) which he was diagnosed with in 1954.
His mental and emotional fragility stayed with him all his adult life—he was in the hospital a dozen times between 1949 -1964—which caused havoc with his relationships. The Poem, “Waking In The Blue” Travels into the surreal world of the mental health institute, specifically the McLean Hospital, Belmont, just outside Boston where he went for treatment. : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Robert Lowell ‘s “WAKING IN THE BLUE“: : “The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’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.
Crows 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.’)
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 the 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 ginger ale’
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night 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. These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
“Waking Early Sunday Morning” : : By Robert Lowell ( 1917 – 1977 ) : : : :
O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.
Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time’s hoard before the day’s begun!
Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.
I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.
O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, “Faith of our fathers,”
and now the congregation gathers.
O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.
When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.
Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash …
Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!
No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life …
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
— Robert Lowell : : From blueridgejournal.com : For Educational Purposes only
“Waking Early Sunday Morning ” A confessional Poem Of 96 lines in 12 Stanzas each of 8 Octaves, Written in the late winter of 1958 and published in the book Life Studies in 1959, a seminal work By Robert Lowell is About The current Godless, Moral State of Earth and the Future of Humankind.
The Poet Speaker remembers from his childhood when there was no reason to worry about waking up in the Sunday Morning or what life would bring. They were ” free to chaff around” , that is, having a silly jolly time of teasing one another. : : However, his current state of being is hard to strive for. He pities for the planet earth where “all joys have gone” and for the ways the worth has reduced. The “Godless Ways” lacks in true passion or dedication to worship. “The Bible is chopped and crucified” , that is, shredded or sliced by cutting in hymns that they don’t read to understand but they sing in peace and preach despair. Only death is the reward. : : The speaker states that if things continue the way they are in which he thinks that this way the generations will suffer in future. He sees “the children fall in small war on the heels of small war.” : : The earth will become “a ghost orbiting forever lost in monotonous sublime”for the style of the population as they are not eager to lift up or set high on to the bigger questions of life. : : : :
Notes for each of the lines in 12 Stanzas Pending visit this post again later on to enjoy the appreciation of the poem V Jayaraj Pune India July 12 , 2023 : : : :
MADHU MALTI 