In his last book, Day by Day, Robert Lowell, when confronting life with anticipated death, made such poems persuasive by setting, against the completions achieved in life, multiple images of subtraction. Day by Day was published in September 1977, just before Lowell died, at sixty, of a heart attack. Although his death appeared premature, he had expected its arrival, as his medical history, his poems, and his late letters reveal; both of his parents had died at sixty, and he had already, in January 1977, been hospitalized for congestive heart disease. He had lived impetuously in his last seven years, beginning a love affair in England with Caroline Guinness while still married to his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Caroline Guinness bore a son, Sheridan; Lowell remained in England, he and Hardwick were divorced, and he and Caroline married. Although Lowell’s bipolar illness had been helped in the sixties by lithium (after decades of recurrent breakdowns), in England there was another discouraging episode of mania and confinement in an asylum. In a hospital poem of Day by Day ironically entitled “Home,” Lowell expects imminent death; noticing the date (January 10, 1976) on the morning paper, he paces the ward,
saying,
as one would instinctively say Hail Mary,
I wish I could die.
Less than ever I expect to be alive
six months from now—
1976,
a date I dare not affix to my grave.1
The date affixed to his grave was to be 1977, but here his self-extirpation is immediate and absolute, as he imagines his own dated, incised tombstone, where text substitutes for presence. In the titles of Day by Day there are numerous premonitions and prophecies of Lowell’s own death and the death of others: “Our Afterlife,” “Suicide,” “Departure,” “Burial,” “Endings,” and—to close the volume—“Epilogue.” The volume contains elegies not only for Lowell’s father and mother but also a preemptive elegy for Jean Stafford (Lowell’s first wife) and actual elegies for several friends and acquaintances—John Berryman, Israel Citkovitz (Guinness’s second husband), and W. H. Auden.2 Day by Day is a volume that takes a last look wherever it casts its eye.
Lowell does attempt, in this final collection, themes countering the premonition of death. Chief among the life themes is the carpe diem of his years in England with Caroline Guinness (although their marriage was disintegrating during the years of composition of Day by Day, and the poem “Last Walk?” announces its end). Lowell may will to conjecture a future, but his deeply embedded faith in sequential narrative—which made him arrange the sonnets of his volume History in chronological order from Adam and Eve to the present—is shaken by the thought that with the approach of death, his life has ceased to create a narrative. His earlier poems were a cavalry charge; now he must tread water.
Can a poet of history in motion invent a style incorporating inertia and death? Lowell’s resources in this predicament are many, but a central and successful one—and my topic here—is his unfailing gift for images of his present paradoxical state, of being wildly alive and yet certain of death. He has two methods for finding the telling image: the first is to relinquish continuous narrative in favor of glimpses, and the second is to call attention again and again to subtraction, the unhappy opposite of that basic resource of narrative, addition. In the premise of the title Day by Day, Lowell’s ad hoc images are removed from the flow of a chronological life history (in which they would normally appear one after the other), in favor of anachronistic Poundian montage, in which images of past and present, universal and particular, succeed each other as if on a flat screen, flashing on the eye in disorienting simultaneity. (By contrast, images of the past in Lowell’s most famous book, Life Studies, tend to remain enclosed within the past that they described.)
“We were kind of religious,” Lowell wrote in closing one of his sonnets, “we thought in images.” If we wish to know what Lowell thought, we can find out from the import of his images. Normally, images would be linked by transitions, but Day by Day leaps from one image to another without explanation. Because at sixty the poet has his whole past spread out before him and can move easily around and within the panorama, he would falsify that late ease of wide-angle spectatorship if he were to offer justification for his erratic linkages. As we read a poem in Day by Day, we must mimic this wandering mind, taking on faith the hope that one piece of the poem has something to do with the others, and that behind all the scattering on offer we can perceive the poet pacing his terrain, taking his last look.
A poet who thinks in images must find a way to render his visual hoard verbal, translating it into the lines and rhythms and formal groupings of verse. The insufficiency of words as representations of images becomes distressing to Lowell as, with age, the images dwindle, and their linguistic force and solidity fade. Attempting to call to mind images of Jean Stafford, he grieves:
How quickly I run through my little set
of favored pictures . . . pictures starved to words.
My memory economizes so prodigally
I know I have suffered theft.
As he reviews life’s images, the poet of Day by Day is perturbed by how they pale and falter and even disappear in the mental narrowing that precedes death. This last of Lowell’s volumes derives much of its imaginative energy from the poet’s investigation of the items that are being, or have been, subtracted, thieved, from his life. His investigation must not only enumerate the actual losses but also discover stylistic means to vivify those now-invisible things that have been subtracted.
Now that history can no longer serve Lowell as a reliable template for the architectonics of life and poetry, now that memory, the indispensable aid to history, has suffered theft, the poet is compelled to rely on “snapshots” (rather than on a seamless narrative) to convey old age, the arrest of forward motion, and the dwindling of memory’s treasured images. His poems need to mimic weakness, immobility, and mental starvation. But— because old age is above all retrospective, the poems must be large enough to encompass, even if in brief memories, the poet’s life from childhood to anticipated death; and large enough, too, to foresee what Lowell calls, in a poem about himself and his friend Peter Taylor, “our afterlife.” Lowell must combine meagerness with memorial extension and—without repudiating his adjectival style of writing—bend his expression to stinted models, reproducing the deletions of time. As he takes his last look at origins and circumstance, he must coordinate his present with his past and affirm, with binocular comprehension, the simultaneous coexistence in late life of Eros and Thanatos.
As I have mentioned, Lowell here writes in a more interrupted style of glimpses, and he contrives multiple images of subtraction. Often these two modes are combined, and although they are separately not without parallel in his earlier poetry, it is in Day by Day that they become closely allied and dominant. Lowell, an only child, had by now lost to death his grandparents, his parents, and his aunts, as well as many friends and fellow writers; he had lost to manic-depressive illness the possibility of a normal life; he had lost two wives to divorce; and by leaving the United States behind, he had lost daily life in New York with Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter, Harriet. Now, through the attrition of mutual illness (his breakdowns, Caroline’s alcoholism), he was losing his third wife (and with her, daily life with his young son, Sheridan); and finally, he had lost physical strength and stamina to congestive heart disease. It is no wonder that subtraction should dominate his imagination, nor that making a final accounting, taking a last look, should lead him to a literal ledger keeping.
Subtractive literality was not, as I’ve said, characteristic of Lowell’s past work. If we want the poet’s own definition of his earlier poetic method, we can find it in the painful Day by Day poem “Unwanted” (which returns further back in time than any other poem in the book, to a Robert Lowell as yet unborn, unwillingly carried by a mother who did not want a child). In the past, he tells us, he used stylistic indirection—evasion, misalliance—to discover revelation, encouraging imaginative vision by searching out “farfetched” images to the exclusion of realistically transcriptive ones:
[I] had flashes when I first found
a humor for myself in images,
farfetched misalliance
that made evasion a revelation.
Can this Hamlet-like method—by indirection finding out direction—suffice in the face of death? The “misalliance” that seemed charming and humorous when, by its evasion of literality, the poet could create unexpected revelation now seems disappointing; as he will say despairingly in “Epilogue” (the poem closing Day by Day), “All’s misalliance.” Allying an image to something else—a proposition, a theme—in a “farfetched” way describes the creation of metaphor—that transfer across, or “farfetching,” as Hopkins would have called it, that brings two unlikely things together. Metaphor comes under suspicion at the hour of death: last wills and testaments avoid metaphor in favor of unambiguous statement. In classical rhetoric, metaphor was conventionally praised for its “aptness,” its “fit,” but that was not the style of metaphor that Lowell had favored in his earlier work; there, he used metaphor to shock, to unsettle, to unnerve, to evade the collocation that would strike the reader as confirming a reliable sense of the object of comparison. The English poet Michael Hofmann, in a review of Lowell’s Collected Poems, brilliantly described the effect of Lowell’s original startling conjunctions:
There is a sort of doubling: the more the words work at their mimetic tasks, the more they show themselves as words. . . . There is something quasi-autonomous about this peculiar function; it can only be done in words, but words handled—or purposely mishandled . . . in such a way that they feel physically solid, as they cannon into each other.3
In such verbal cannoning and its consequent stylistic friction, Lowell found the energy and pressure that corresponded to his notion of history in full forward overdrive. When he begins Day by Day, Lowell hardly knows whether to preserve his native “farfetched” style or to abjure it. Can he sustain the concentration and symbolic meaning attained by that former aggressive style of metaphor, or must he—as he seems to feel in the poem “Shifting Colors”—let his writing weaken toward the literal? To his own surprise, he finds himself uttering a plea to be spared the intensity of sense memory that stimulates metaphorical revelation:
I seek leave unimpassioned by my body,
I am too weak to strain to remember, or give
recollection the eye of a microscope. I see
horse and meadow, duck and pond,
universal consolatory
description without significance,
transcribed verbatim by my eye.
And yet to “transcribe verbatim”—to say “horse and meadow, duck and pond” without the obliquity and collision of metaphor—is not truly possible for anyone who still wishes, as Lowell does, to imagine images and compose poetry. My aim in what follows is to trace, through Lowell’s images and statements of literal subtraction, how Day by Day takes its last look and remains—while conveying the weakness, stasis, and emotional starvation of age—imaginatively alive, on the side of creativity. We need to take note of Lowell’s single subtractions, but also to ask how they are arranged (or, as Elizabeth Bishop would say in her elegy for Lowell, “deranged”). The judgment voiced in “deranged” sprang to Bishop’s mind not only from Lowell’s handling of his recent sonnets (cannibalized from the volume called Notebook and re-formed into the volumes called History and For Lizzie and Harriet) but also, probably, from a first reading of Day by Day. Much of the poetry of Day by Day evades logic, or “deranges” sequence. I believe the “derangement” is provoked by the acute need to reproduce the chiaroscuro of repeated loss and to forecast the unimaginable loss to come.
In the poem called “Our Afterlife II,” for instance, Lowell writes, as Plath had done, as if he were already dead and could see himself “from the outside.” He becomes the coffined corpse awaited in Boston’s Church of the Advent, from which (in obedience to his legal will) he was to be buried. Death’s subtractions appear here in the present tense, not the future, as Lowell watches his contemporaries die:
The old boys drop like wasps
from windowsill and pane.
In a church
the Psalmist’s glass mosaic shepherd
and bright green pastures
seem to wait
with the modish faithlessness
and erotic daydream
of art nouveau for our funeral.
The poet’s arresting move here is to treat the stained-glass window’s literal religious matter—the shepherd of the twenty-third Psalm allegorically representing Jesus—in a distancing manner denoting his loss of faith. With faith subtracted, the poet can register only the window’s aesthetic style—secular, erotic, modish. There is no “farfetched” metaphor here, no evasion of the literal matter of the church window. What is Lowellesque is the way in which facts of matter and facts of manner are blasphemously fused as word succeeds word. Words of religious import—“church” and “Psalmist” and “shepherd” and “green pastures”—attract each other because they belong to a single semiotic field; and even imagining that the Shepherd of souls would “wait” as the poet enters the valley of the shadow of death would not violate religious sentiment. But to every religious word here some connoisseur’s word has been attached. Lowell mentions the material appearance of the Shepherd as “glass mosaic” and comments on the glassmaker’s particular choice of “bright” green for the representation of the green pastures. Whereas the true Shepherd would indeed “wait” for the dying believer, this stained-glass Jesus, being an aesthetic construct, merely “seems” to wait. Where faith should be, there is the faithlessness of fashionable art, art of a “modish” sort commissioned for the church’s turn-of-the-century “up-to-date” windows. Where contemplation should be, the sensuous power of the art-nouveau style introduces instead an “erotic daydream”; and with eternity subtracted from his view, the poet can merely notice, name, and judge the aesthetic deficiencies, for a divine subject, of the too-fashionable art nouveau.
What are we to make of Lowell’s aesthetic “pollution” of his Christian stained-glass window? And how are we to react to Lowell’s apparent callousness of reference to “the old boys” who “drop like wasps” from their own, different, windowpane? The deletion of self that is effected by such a strategy is total: the poet is nothing more than another unregretted wasp; his funeral will be attended only by the surrounding church decorations, not by his Savior. By interleaving the sacred nouns of religion with estimating words of connoisseurship, Lowell, after inviting into the poem the moment of cultural belief in which the window was installed in good faith, “corrects” that belief as if he were a secular art historian so alienated from an ongoing funeral service that he is reduced to judging the church appointments. The pang that ought to attend the phrase “our funeral” is held off in favor of a detachment marked by the semi-blasphemous frisson attending the mixed diction that assimilates wasps to men, the Good Shepherd to modish art. There is indeed a brief resort to metaphor in the subtracted wasps, but the rest is literal: the poet himself, about to be subtracted, is unmetaphorically real, the stained glass with faith subtracted is merely real, and Lowell’s silent subtraction of the psalmist’s earnest “for Thou art with me” into a feigned semblance of waiting is a denatured “real.”
The detached and literal manner of “Our Afterlife II” affects images throughout Day by Day, especially those conveying the physical state of the aging body. Not only do such images minimize metaphor, they are also voiced in a “low” diagnostic diction of bruises and bumps unsuitable for the “revelation” aimed at by the earlier “misalliances” of metaphor:
Our mannerisms harden—
a bruise is immortal,
the instant egg on my shin
I got from braking a car
too sharply a year ago
stays firm brown and yellow,
the all-weather color for death.
Could any respectable poetry be closer to transcriptive prose? Except for the mention of “hardened” mannerisms, a single whimsical exaggeration—“a bruise is immortal,” and the “dead” metaphor of the egg bump—the passage could come from anyone’s diary. Other passages about bodily decline take on greater drama but remain literal, as in the uttering of Lowell’s fear of the gross physical subtractions of accidental death and his dread of prolonged pain:
I ask for a natural death,
no teeth on the ground,
no blood about the place . . .
It’s not death I fear,
but unspecified, unlimited pain.
Yet another such literal moment looks to a futile future, imagining the most literal subtraction of all, as the body becomes a corpse:
the time when any illness is chronic,
and the years of discretion are spent on complaint—until the wristwatch is taken from the wrist.
The close of that passage exemplifies the factuality of which I have been speaking, but it also reveals yet again Lowell’s subtractive way of managing images into meagerness, done here with peculiar exactness: take the word “wristwatch” (the poet says), subtract “watch” (as the hospital attendant will do after death), and the despoiled naked “wrist” is left unadorned and time-less, exposed, dead.
Subtraction is all the more conspicuous in late Lowell because his poetic aim has so often, in the past, been one of accumulation. Critics pointed out, when Lowell appeared on the scene, his heavy artillery of adjectives and nouns, volleys of them, noisily “cannoning”—to return to Hofmann’s verb—across the page. The rhetorical antagonist of this former accumulation, the managing of subtraction, is in Day by Day equally exhilarating to watch, though it is often, on the page, eerie to encounter—most eerie, perhaps, when Lowell subtracts himself from himself, stopping the poem cold. At the end of his elegy to his mother, he says—and we at first feel we are hearing from the poet the recommended “mature” understanding of a difficult parent—
It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am. . . .
Chillingly, Lowell appends a closing self-deleting proviso—“If I am.” Earlier, he had been Caligula, Medusa, a monster: “Pity the monsters!” he had cried, being one of them. Uncertain, as he leaves the stage, whether he has at last metamorphosed into a human being, he stops and subtracts himself, by his final hypothesis, from the human species.
A more gruesome self-subtractive closure appears in the poem called “Turtle.” It begins with an anecdote: as a boy, Lowell had tried to pick up a snapping turtle by what he thought was the tail but was in reality a foreleg. “I could have lost a finger,” he says wryly, with adult detachment. The end of “Turtle,” however, unrolls a grisly reprise in nightmare of the child’s original fear. Many other life events have died, in the unrolling of the reel of accumulated memory, but not this one of mutilating amputation:
Too many pictures
have screamed from the reel . . . in the rerun,
the snapper holds on till sunset—
in the awful instantness of retrospect,
its beak
works me underwater drowning by my neck,
as it claws away pieces of my flesh
to make me small enough to swallow.
The transmutation of the literality of dream into aesthetic patterning is accomplished here by the presence of sonic echo and parallel syntax: “awful” phonetically matches “claws” and “swallow”; “retrospect” harshly prophesies “beak” and “works” and “neck” and “make.” The original “farfetched” cinematic metaphor of recursive extended time, “the rerun,” is corrected by the poet’s remarking on the dream’s “awful instantness of retrospect.” The turtle’s piece-by-piece clawing and swallowing take place within the dream instantaneously, as the nightmare mimics the assaultive simultaneity of images on Lowell’s old-age screen, presenting and subtracting at the same moment.
In another mood, Lowell keeps the horror of death’s subtraction at arm’s length by a humor that transmutes subtraction into more congenial (or comic) figures of loss, either a decrease in weight or (by deletion of time) a decrease in age. As Lowell, now divorced, visits Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York apartment of their long marriage, the furniture seems to be becoming less heavy in a retrograde and subtractive motion that will in time ensure its complete disappearance:
I can give the dates when they entered our lives:
Cousin Belle’s half-sofa,
her carrot dangled before famished heirs,
is twenty years lighter.The small portrait of Cousin Cassie,
corsetted like the Empress Eugénie
and willed to father when I was seven,
is now too young for me to talk to.
As furniture becomes lighter and portraits younger in their asymptotic approaches to nothingness, Lowell himself, in inverse proportion, grows burdened and older. As he arrives at death, these life-long objects will reach ultimate weightlessness and vanish with him.
As one becomes conscious of Lowell’s insistence on manifesting by images the subtractions he faces, one sees them on almost every page, in every day, of Day by Day. Myth itself loses its solidity: Ulysses on Circe’s island, after the glamour of the enchantress has faded in debasement, “dislikes everything in his impoverished life of myth.” As Lowell’s last walk with his third wife ends, even nostalgia for the marriage proves as temporary as the snow of yesterday; both are subtracted from the day, nostalgia by violent mental destruction, snow by its nature as a transient thing: “nostalgia pulverized by thought, / nomadic as yesterday’s whirling snow.” “Les neiges d’antan,” originally metaphorical, have been literalized into real weather, “yesterday’s . . . snow.” Anything that can be subtracted from living—from nostalgia to snow to the human body to the idealizations of myth—will, somewhere in these pages, be subtracted.
There are, in the longer poems of Day by Day, more complex portrayals of old age, in which the subtractions that have already happened, and are only too evident to others, are denied by the self in a vain attempt to sustain the hallucination of one’s continued youth. One of Lowell’s surrogate selves—an old wine baron in the poem “Ear of Corn”—acts out this delusion of persistent youth as he insists on seeing himself as sexually powerful still. At a dinner party, the baron becomes, to Lowell, a horrifying image of himself, an aged Pluto who wants to carry off a young Persephone (daughter of the corn goddess, Demeter, hence the title “Ear of Corn”). In the central passage of the poem, at table, the old host bends his sexual attention on a guest’s young wife, who looks back at him, disgusted:
His eyes never leave her lips.
She cannot cure his hallucination
he can bribe or stare
any woman he wants into orgasm. . . .
He fills her ear
with his old sexual gramophone
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Her face is delicate and disgusted,
as if she had been robbed, raped,
or repudiated by her mother.
For his conclusion to “Ear of Corn,” Lowell borrows from Saint Paul’s epigram in Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Lowell cruelly uses the exalted biblical phrase as a summary of the delusion of youth that the spindly legged wine baron and by implication Lowell himself strive to maintain by subtracting (as they think) years from their old faces by fastening themselves to young women:
Is this the substance hoped for,
after a grasshopper life of profit—
to stand shaking on fine green legs,
to meet the second overflowing of Eros,
himself younger in each young face . . . ?
The poem immediately corrects this self-deceiving subtraction of years in the lines following, when the old baron looks into the face of the young wife, his guest, and suddenly, in the mirror of her disgusted face, comes to see himself as he hideously is,
[seeing] in that mirror
a water without the life of water,
a face aging
to less generosity than it had.
Those characteristic words of subtraction, “without” and “less,” counter the baron’s false earlier subtraction of years when he saw himself “younger.” Metaphoric though “Ear of Corn” sometimes is (in its parabolic grasshopper, its resort to a fertility myth), it subsides, as do so many of these Day by Day poems, into the literal, even if the literal becomes almost unintelligible, as in the evocation of sexual impotence in the subtractive idea of “a water without the life of water.”
Although the idea that age and death subtract value is not new, what is new in Lowell’s verse in Day by Day is not only his fertility in finding a plethora of words and images for subtraction, but also his use of subtraction as a major rhetorical move, as in the diptych and closing summary of “Ear of Corn.” But, we might ask, can Lowell not counter that idea of age’s successive subtractions by an account of what age is said to add to life—the wisdom associated with experience, perhaps, or that “second overflowing of Eros” celebrated in The Dolphin and prolonged in the poems about Caroline and Sheridan in Day by Day? It seems he cannot; in Day by Day even affirmative poems end in loss. “Marriage,” for instance, at first presents itself as the most confident love poem in the volume but is shaken as it progresses. On the left panel (Part I) of this marriage diptych, we see the new Lowell family group: the poet himself, Caroline (already pregnant with Sheridan), and Caroline’s three daughters from a former marriage, all dressed in “Sunday-best” for what Lowell calls, with ironic alliteration, “the formal family photograph in color.” The unseen “center of symmetry” in that family photograph, the poet adds, is his as-yet-unborn son. The right panel of the diptych (Part II) offers a different marriage group; we see Van Eyck’s “formal family portrait” of the couple Giovanni and Giovanna Arnolfini:
His wife’s with child;
he lifts a hand,
thin and white as his face
held up like a candle to bless her . . .
smiling, swelling, blossoming. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They are rivals in homeliness and love;
her hand lies like china in his,
her other hand
is in touch with the head of her unborn child.
They wait and pray,
as if the airs of heaven
that blew on them when they married
were now a common visitation.
But that gentle portrait of marriage, and that prayer for the continued favor of the airs of heaven, are undone by the end of the poem, which at first returns us to the merely momentary flash of the contemporary photographer, and then tells us that Giovanni will die twenty years before Giovanna—as though one figure in the Arnolfini portrait were suddenly subtracted by erasure. Lowell’s flash-forward prophesies his own end:
They wait and pray,
as if the airs of heaven
that blew on them when they married
were now a common visitation,
not a miracle of lighting
for the photographer’s sacramental instant.Giovanni and Giovanna,
who will outlive him by 20 years . . .
By reducing the sacrament of marriage—with its promise of fidelity unto death—to “the photographer’s sacramental instant,” Lowell deletes all binding promise beyond the instant of the camera flash; and by deleting Giovanni from the couple in the portrait, he deletes Giovanna’s naive trust in the perpetuity of heaven’s blessing. Just as “Last Walk?” had ended with the pulverization of nostalgia by thought, so “Marriage”—after its comparison of a contemporary family photograph to a Renaissance family portrait—defaces both pictures by subtraction, unable to leave them in the original mode of prayer and promise.
But surely, we say, resisting Lowell’s unhappy last looks, age exhibits something additive, something that is not waning? Is there, in Lowell, no binocular view of an aliveness cohabiting with deadness? Perhaps, no matter how the body fails, the mental realm is immune to subtractions? We are rewarded by seeing how Lowell, in a striking poem addressed to his old friend Peter Taylor, allows for the improvement in art made possible by the accretion of years. The title itself, however, introduces death as the price exacted for that ripened art: the poem is called “Our Afterlife I.” It exemplifies, in its series of images darting from present to past, from possessor to inheritor, from Taylor’s Tennessee to Lowell’s England, the poet’s “deranged” way of conducting his last poems, glance by glance. Here, the initial glimpse is a buoyant one of two birds, sketched—as we might by now expect—in literal image followed by literal personal statement. Lowell observes two red cardinals who “dart and tag and mate— / young as they want to be”—as he and Peter Taylor are not:
Southbound—
a couple in passage,
two Tennessee cardinals
in green December outside the window
dart and tag and mate—
young as they want to be.
We’re not.
Since my second fatherhood
and stay in England, I am a generation older.
Yet Lowell and Taylor, even if threatened by the infirmities of age, can be assimilated to the free and sexual cardinals, or so the poet tries to think:
We are dangerously happy—
our book-bled faces
streak like red birds,
dart unstably, ears cocked to catch
the first shy whisper of deafness.
However, a single loss, that of hearing, once mentioned, generates violent subtractions, Time’s recent “killings” of fellow writers:
This year killed
Pound, Wilson, Auden. . . .
Forced by these deaths to acknowledge his own mortality, Lowell fears the loss of the bloom of vigor in himself and his friend, themselves once promising beginners. Now, in age, they are jealous of the young “inheritors” biding their time, waiting for the patriarchs to die:
promise has lost its bloom,
the inheritor reddens
like a false rose—
nodding, nodding, nodding.
The poet recalls the time “when Cupid”—he of the emblematically red hearts—“was still the Christ of love’s religion,” and time seemed—with “sleight of hand”—to stand still. Besieged by the cold wave outside and the tinnitus ringing in his ear inside, aware of the stealthy advance of the clock, the poet declares in an aphorism the paradoxical additive subtractions of the end of life: “Each saving breath / takes something.”
Against the melancholy conclusion that subtraction is the single constant quality of his present life, Lowell rises to a memorable defense of age’s contribution to art. If the young inheritor knew the cost of life, he would not envy the aging writer. Nonetheless, in spite of all the subtractions, old writers, like old painters, are rich in their accumulation of perspectives as they stand on the eminence of experience and expertise:
This is riches:
the eminence not to be envied,
the account
accumulating layer and angle,
face and profile,
50 years of snapshots,
the ladder of ripening likeness.
After fifty years, the painter has accumulated a comprehensive album of sketches recording layer and angle, face and profile; the photographer, though he has only an instant for his flash, can point to his full portfolio of snapshots; the aspiring poet has at last reached the height of metaphor by ascending his Frostian “ladder of ripening likeness.” Now he can pluck the mature fruit of his labors—what Frost (in “After Apple-picking”) called “the great harvest I myself desired.”
With the Keatsian “ripening” of the fruit of imagination, an implied redness returns to suffuse the poem, and for a moment Lowell and Taylor can once again be the darting birds of aliveness. Perhaps recollecting Heidegger’s “thrownness”—the fact that we find ourselves pitched into existence without any choice in the matter—the poet depicts the still-airborne selves of himself and his friend:
We are things thrown in the air
alive in flight. . . .
Had the poem ended there, it would have announced a victory over death, its last image a triumphant one of soaring aliveness. But even this—the most affirmative poem in Day by Day—has to admit the truth: that (to adapt Frost) nothing red can stay. The ripening declines into rust; but with a second reactive claim for life, Lowell turns back to a different Keatsian image, that of the “chameleon poet.” If the red vitality of the poet and his friend has faded over time to rust, it is because as artists, still alive, they are taking on, as always, the color of their context:
We are things thrown in the air
alive in flight . . .
our rust the color of the chameleon.
The subtraction of redness has now become an advantage, adding another color, layer, and angle to the creations of old age. The balance of subtraction and addition in “Our Afterlife I” seems to me the most finely achieved structure in Day by Day, false neither to subtraction nor to addition. Its “thinking in images” bears witness to a process of thought that begins in the warmth of life-long friendship, mentions present infirmities, musters the riches of experience as advantage, reiterates the aliveness of the friends’ mental and physical being, but in the end admits age’s subtraction of color and energy, turning red to rust, while contradicting that subtraction by affirming the artist’s still-transformative power to change, chameleon-like, with circumstance.
There is then a consoling aesthetic advantage in the productions of age; the later snapshots in the accomplished photographer’s album are bound to surpass the early “blunders” that Lowell recalls in the poem “Suicide”:
. . . our first home-photographs,
headless, half-headed, tilting
extinguished by a flashbulb.
Even so, Day by Day’s defense of experience as a perfecting of art cannot reach the gladness of “Fishnet,” Lowell’s earlier account of vocation in The Dolphin:
Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime
knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;
the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.4
Yet even that passage, invoking the aere perennius of Horace’s claim, must end with subtraction, as Lowell acknowledges that since his art—like all art—will eventually lose cultural intelligibility, it can have no permanent future. But the dactyls of the quatrain ring nonetheless with triumph, not submission: the poet’s net of forms in The Dolphin will remain, in his hammered phrase, “nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”
The later volume Day by Day, in its elegiac last looks at life, cannot make its claims for the future in such a Roman tone. At most, it looks to a new generation to better its own accomplishments. In “For Sheridan,” the most moving poem of binocular vision in Day by Day, Lowell takes as his subject the uncanny resemblance of his son at five to a photograph of himself at five. The inner blindness of his own life, the result of past biological and psychic damage, is subsumed in the childlike word “hurt.” Alluding to Saint Paul’s “For we see now through a glass darkly,” he identifies his early self, before he was damaged, with the self of his young son:
We could see clearly
and all the same things
before the glass was hurt.
This poem of almost disbelieving hope ends with the poet’s crushing recollection of his own intentions and failures, coupled with a wish for a better life for Sheridan. It ends in a standoff between the subtractive failures of Lowell’s own life and a hope for Sheridan’s future. Lowell tips the scales toward hope by ending on the additive word “better”:
Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense
of suicidal absolution
that what we intended and failed
could never have happened—
and must be done better.
Lowell—as he is always likely to do in Day by Day— returns to literal statement here, depending for emotional effect on the allusion to the “hurt” that made him unable to carry out his own life intentions. Because he does not want Sheridan to come to his own point of helpless “suicidal absolution,” he insists, though in an impersonal form, that Sheridan must carry out the intentions of his own life better than his father has done. “Better”—the comparative of improvement—echoes into vacancy, as Lowell, “suicidally” absolving himself, subtracts himself from the field of action, leaving it to his son. At least, Lowell reflects, the scene of the world has been repopulated in the person of this child, who brings the same Lowellesque physical features, but perhaps a healthier, or more normal, psyche, to the endeavors of life. The old year disappears, the new youthful one comes forth from the wings, and Lowell’s journal, Day by Day, ends as we might have anticipated, on actual fact, as the poet adds his son to the sum of things while subtracting his own life as unsalvageable.
When Wallace Stevens’s friend Henry Church died, the poet wrote of Sleep and Peace as figures in the “mythology of modern death” (“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”). Those allegorical personages, though secularized, bore a strong resemblance to Christian images of death, as Stevens’s rhythms bore resemblance both to lullaby and to hymn. The enormous difference in tone between Stevens’s ornate murmuring farewells and Lowell’s acute and worldly images—an art-nouveau church window, a nightmare of being swallowed alive, Cousin Belle’s sofa, cardinals in flight, a family photograph—testifies to the major change in the elegiac vocabulary of American poetry brought about by Robert Lowell, who, with his subtractions and his literalness, gave a spare and contemporary tone, in Day by Day, to the confrontation of mental energy and physical decline.