The study of the elegy—to get a sense of what the genre is as it was received and transformed by poets in the English language—can be accomplished by looking at the structure of a few poems. Here the reader is asked to get out a copy of Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais” and to pay attention to the ways that they adapt the form of the Alexandrian pastoral elegy. Useful to have at hand is something like the Norton Anthology of Poetry for annotation of the poems. And, having taken in these classic loci of the elegy, then to look briefly at Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish.” Remarkable poems all and worth the time.
Partly I will be tracking Peter Sacks’s reading of the poems in his The English Elegy. We are tracking old, inherited formal structures for surviving and transforming the kinds of devastating loss that can sicken the roots of life. To begin . . .
THE STRUCTURE OF LYCIDAS
1–14 YET ONCE MORE, O YE LAURELS
Invocation: laurel, myrtle, and ivy are anciently associated with poetry. Apostrophe: grief and an animate universe. “yet once more”: he’s writing another elegy, and the tradition is receiving another one; echo as a feature of the genre. Grief is haunted, echoic. Allusion: the verse echoes directly Virgil’s “Eclogue II”: “Et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proxima myrte” and Spenser’s elegy for Sydney in which he complains of the death and of his poem as “a flower untimely cropt.” Milton was twenty-nine years old. The fall into language: the “forced fingers” and the shattered leaves underscore the death as violation and the poem as violation of grief’s silence. “For Lycidas is dead”: echoes this repeated cry of the name of the dead one in earlier elegies and also, probably, the crying of the name of the dead and to-be-resurrected year-god in very ancient rituals: see the cry “Tamuz! Tamuz!” in Pound’s Cantos.
15–36 BEGIN THEN, SISTERS OF THE SACRED WELL
Calling on the muses: this is of course deeply traditional, in this case echoing the opening of Hesiod’s Theogony:
With the Helicon muses let us start
Our song: they hold the great and godly mount
Of Helicon, and on their delicate feet
They dance around the darkly bubbling spring
And round the altar of the mighty Zeus
It may also refer to what Sacks calls the “barely Christianized” version of this image of a seminal patriarchal source of life-energy in Revelations: “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of Gog and of the Lamb.” “Hence with denial vain and coy excuse”: strangely sexual courting, seducing of the female muses. “For we were nursed on the selfsame hill” etc.: to mourn another is to mourn one’s own death. “Together both”: this is the convention of the young poets as fellow shepherds; it was to be understood as referring to their schooldays together—the “high lawn” is Cambridge—but it also calls up the vivid natural world of childhood; it mourns growing up, versions of a lost self. “old Damoetas”: probably meant to call up some idea of a tutor at school in the person of an old shepherd; his kindliness about their early verse contrasts with the anxiety about judgment in taking on this big poem; the time of writing before workshop-judgment miseries and self-consciousness. This mild figure concludes the idyll.
37–49 BUT O THE HEAVY CHANGE
Now Lycidas is addressed, and his loss is treated as absolute and based, curiously, on a prohibition: “Now thou art gone, and never must return.” “The willows and the hazel copses”: all of nature is sickened by the loss—this is the myth that also underlies Eliot’s The Wasteland as an elegy in search of its subject/victim. Cf. Berryman’s Dream Songs: “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing,” which suggests what happened to the modern elegy: when the cosmology collapsed, the form became diagnostic. Thus, Eliot’s Phlebas the Phoenician may echo the drowned Lycidas, a possibilty that seems to have occurred to Robert Lowell in “The Quaker Graveyard.” And consider Carl Solomon who is imagined to show up wet—as if emerged from the sea—at the door of the cottage at the end of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” “Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear.” So the deep loss is the loss of the poems Henry King might have written. And more deeply the ability to hear. Here the Christian trope of the poem, shepherd = priest, is first adumbrated. Perhaps an echo of the gospel of John: “He that hath an ear let him hear what the spirit saith.”
50–63 WHERE WERE YE, NYMPHS,
The complaint to local gods—the complaint against nature for not preserving the life of the beloved—is a convention of the elegy and accurate to the psychology of grief. “Druids”: Milton mixes the British and the mythic landscapes. “What could the Muse”: Here for the first time the efficacy of poetry is questioned—a problem that persists in the elegies for poets. Auden on Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Hence “Ay me! I fondly dream” could be written over the entrance to schools of creative writing. “For her inchanting son”: Even Calliope could not save Orpheus—and perhaps poetry isn’t going to save anybody. Critics have pointed out that Milton’s mother died five months before he wrote the poem. Hence Lycidas as a shadow elegy for the loss of his mother as “Howl” is a shadow elegy for the mad Naomi Ginsberg.
64–84 ALAS! WHAT BOOTS IT
The response to the crisis sponsored by poetry-gloom. And Apollo’s rebuke, telling him that he is not to court success but the “perfect witness of all-judging Jove,” is probably the least useful thing in the poem for modern readers. For Milton, the Puritan reformer, it involves a larger idea of sonhood. See Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews: “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us; and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be under subjection to the Father of spirits, and live?” Sacks points out that this passage marks a transition in the poem from the addressing of female figures to the addressing of male figures, a movement, he says, “that is itself part of the work of mourning: the movement from the primary object of desire associated with the mother and an identification with the father and his symbols of power.” Which more or less echoes Jacques Lacan’s account of how we resolve the Oedipus complex and acquire language (the non of the father is the nom of things) and the ensuing lifelong pursuit in language of what language displaces and can’t recover. Which considerably intensifies doubt about the efficacy of language and hence of elegy and would seem to be a point of crisis in the contemporary use of the form.
85–100 O FOUNTAIN ARETHUSE
The creakiest transition in the poem: having leapt past the pastoral mode in his consideration of the problem of poetry, he announces his return to it, evoking Theocritus (the fountain Arethuse in Sicily) and Virgil’s Mincius, and asks the next question—not Why, Mom, didn’t you save him? but Why, Dad, did this happen? Triton pleads Neptune’s innocence and also that of Aeolus, the storm god, and says the cause was “that fatal and perfidious bark, built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.” How this works figuratively—bad ship? human error? original sin?—I’m really not sure, but it is this issue that seems to lead to the next passage, in which the flaring of anger, and the denunciation of the world, another convention of the elegy, occurs.
101–31 NEXT CAMUS, REVEREND SIRE
After Triton—what Nature has to say—comes Camus—or Cambridge—what classical learning has to say: it says “alas! alas!”—and after that comes St. Peter who simply unleashes a vengeful denunciation of the corrupt clergy of England. This makes more psychological than logical sense. It doesn’t answer the question, why death? or why this death? It asks the question that anger asks: why this death when the world is so full of assholes we would have been well rid of? In a larger scheme, anger and justice are closely allied. Because the fundamental unfairness of death is in the world, we hate all the other kinds of unfairness, and one power of language is to speak against them. Thus, one of the fruits of death is that it makes us hate injustice. This is the root of this tradition of denunciation in the classical elegy. And this is where Milton unites the classical and Christian traditions through the figure of the Lamb. The Church is a bad shepherd. It is a shifting of the burden of pain, and a retaking of sexual energy from grief through totemic anger. In some contemporary version, I suppose, the Cam would be replaced by the Iowa River or the Mississippi and bad teacher-poets might be denounced for producing young artists whose “lean and flashy songs grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”
132–53 RETURN, ALPHEUS
The second return to the classical mode after it had been outleapt. This time the return seems to signal the return of poetry, of a kind of erotic confidence. For this the evocation of the river god Alpheus and the nymph Arethusa, associated with the springs of poetry, seems a figure. And the flowers—symbols of sacrifice, but also resurrection—cf. Gluck’s The Wild Iris—get heaped on the “laureate hearse” in a passage beloved by English poets and imitated for two hundred years.
154–64 AY ME! WHILST THEE THE SHORE
Milton is careful—as a Christian in a culture that was still quite interested in ghosts—to define as fictive this bringing home to England as spirit the body of Lycidas. It’s another thing we do with grief: marry it to local earth. And the angel who looks homeward is not just the patron saint of mariners, but a figure for Justice, indeed a figure for revolutionary Justice, which was to sweep England in a few years and lead to regicide and a new social order. Michael is also protecting Protestant England from Catholic Spain, so the political subtext here is large.
165–85 WEEP NO MORE, WOEFUL SHEPHERDS
The apotheosis. After the purging of anger, the return of sexual energy, restored confidence in imagination, which brings the lost one home and plants him there, Milton invokes Christian resurrection, mixed with pagan nuptial feast, in a language of which African American Protestantism—“When the Saints Come Ma’ching In”—is an echo. Lycidas as “Genius” of the shore seems a reinscribing of the possibility of poetry in terms that blends pagan, Christian, and English elements.
186–93 THUS SANG THE UNCOUTH SWAIN
As Sacks says, the mourner’s act of self-distancing is taken one step further in this little coda written in ottava rima. “Sun” here puns on “son” in ways that have both Christian and psychological bearings. For those of us who don’t have a use for the Christian mythos of the poem, it is interesting to think about what Shelley would do with the form and to think of what his contemporary John Ruskin wrote: “Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.” Something else we have trouble believing.
THE STRUCTURE OF ADONAIS
The best-known scholarly reading of the poem is to be found in Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language, Johns Hopkins, 1959. The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas, the opening passage very closely resembles Bion’s “Lament for Adonis,” one of the most important Alexandrian elegies, which Shelley had also translated. Keats died in 1821 at the age of twenty-six. Shelley is twenty-nine. He died the following year.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and other romantic poets avoided what they thought of as the artificial conventions of pastoral, and Wordsworth wrote against them by portraying the actual lives of the rural poor in the Napoleonic era. Shelley picks up the convention to write this strange, allegorical rather than pastoral poem that nevertheless observes many conventions of pastoral elegy, some of them ironically. Twice as long as “Lycidas,” it shares a subject—the untimely death of a young poet—and some of the same issues—what poetry is in the face of death, how to overcome grief, what to feel in the face of the trivialization of poetry by the culture (this much stronger in Shelley, a central anxiety), and how to come to terms with one’s own work and one’s own death in relation to all of the above. Critics have commented on Shelley’s idealizing Neoplatonism, the way this makes the whole problem of representation in poetry acute, and on what seems to be the intense death wish in the poem. So it has gotten a lot of attention as a psychological document. Whether it is a successful poem or not, whether you can submit to Shelley’s way with language and imagery or not, it’s worth looking at how he frames these issues in this elegy, where the forms of very ancient funerary ritual are put to use in a struggle with a sense of the uselessness of poetry.
STANZA 1
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Echoes Bion and the tradition of vegetation myth directly. By giving Keats the name of both Adonis and Adonai—Hebrew for “Lord”—see Lowell: “The Lord survives the rainbow of his will” and Ginsberg: “Lord lord lord caw caw caw”—Shelley at the outset splits (or joins) the earthly and the spiritual symbolism of the dead poet. The phrase—
though our tears thaw not
—questions the efficacy of poetry immediately, and the phrase—
And thou, Sad Hour
—immediately turns the task of mourning over to the first of a long series of delegated mourners. That it takes Shelley so long to present himself as mourner has been much commented on.
his fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto eternity
This makes the claim for transcendence immediately, most critics have said very prematurely.
STANZAS 2–7
Where wert thou, mighty Mother
Invokes the convention—“Where were ye, nymphs . . . what could the Muse herself . . .”—of questioning the female figures, including the mother, who failed to offer protection. In Shelley’s allegory the mother of the poet is Urania, the goddess of astronomy. Here she is Venus, so like the split Adonis/Adonai there is the earthly-heavenly maternal figure Venus/Urania. And she seems not to be listening. Shelley is trying to wake her up, to make her mourn.
With veiled eyes, mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise she sate,
She seems to be listening to some bad poet instead—Wordsworth, whom Shelley thought had sold out his earlier radicalism?—who “rekindled all the fading melodies with which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, . . . he hid the coming bulk of death.”
Yet wherefore (line 21)
After asking her to weep, he somewhat spasmodically withdraws the request. Why bother? These lines echo a passage in Keats’s “Endymion,” which Shelley had been reading: “Saturn, look up—though herefore, poor old King?”
Lament anew, Urania (line 29)
These lines appeal to her as the mother of a line of poets—Homer, Dante, Milton. Sacks: “Shelley is trying to compel a certain recognition” and “would have Urania admit the poet Keats to a grand genealogy, one that would perhaps include himself . . .” These poets are (see stanza one) “the sons of light.”
The broken lily (line 55)
Sacks comments that the broken flower image “by some sad maiden cherished” emphasizes a poet not come into his sexual force. He calls this image “castrative” and connects it to the introduction of the father, “kingly Death” in the next line in which he brings the reader and Urania to Keats’s grave in Rome. Here the dark father must be faced.
STANZAS 8–17
Shelley now presents a profusion of allegorical delegate-mourners, all of whose mourning is inadequate—they are the “pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.” Even Hyacinth and Narcissus, traditional figures of consolation and renewal, are impotent, and Spring, Milton’s trope of the sexual renewal of the earth, throws “down her kindling buds as if she Autumn were.” This passage evokes the elegiac convention of the procession, and it ends, surprisingly and abruptly, with a curse against the critic whose review of Endymion, Shelley believed, had broken Keats’s spirit and contributed to his death. This belongs to the convention in which the poet must find a focus for his anger and express it in order to mourn successfully.
STANZAS 18–21
Ah, woe is me!
The first expression of personal grief. Sacks: “By expressing anger, Shelley has begun to undo the repression of his grief.” These stanzas express anguish at the meaningless renewal of nature and desire that he doesn’t feel—“The amorous birds now pair in every brake”—and come to the anguish of human consciousness, which, alone in creation, knows that it must die: “Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone be as a sword consumed before the sheath by sightless lightning?” and leads past that to anguish that “grief itself is mortal” and then leads to ultimate questions: “Whence are we and why are we? of what scene the actors or spectators?” Why this life in which “month follow month with woe and year wake year to sorrow”? Note: What Shelley wants connected to immortality in humans is that “which knows,” a sword, the intense atom.
STANZAS 22–29
As if the poet can’t bear the questions, the poem veers back to the mother figure Urania. Misery wakes her from her paradise, “swift as a thought by the snake Memory stung.” And Mother Poetry walks into the tomb and confronts Father Death. She shames Death at first and almost brings her son back to life—“breath revisited those lips”—and she makes her speech of mourning.
STANZAS 30–38
Which brings forth a procession of poet-mourners, Byron, Moore, Shelley himself (described in the third person), and Leigh Hunt. The central passage is Shelley’s self-portrait in 31–34. It ends with another denunciation of the critic in 36–37. This curse makes for a complex turning point, because what Shelley curses him with is life: “Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me.” So what elegy and mourning traditionally seek the recovery of has become the object of contempt.
STANZAS 39–52
And with that, grief is defiantly transformed:
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites that scream below
and spirit and the unembodied purity of poetry exalted:
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came
and again:
He hath awakened from the dream of life
STANZAS 53–55
Lots of readers have found these last stanzas profoundly disturbing not only because they seem to contain intense suicidal yearning, but because they are so prophetic of Shelley’s death the following year. My spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng. When Shelley—who could not swim—was sailing in a storm, a passing crew warned him to strike his sail. He ignored them and drowned. The question of whether his death was an accident or not has never been answered and some biographers have looked to the end of “Adonais” for evidence.
ELIOT’S “THE WASTELAND” AND THE ELEGY TRADITION
If you’ve studied “Lycidas,” it’s interesting to look at “The Wasteland” again in terms of the number of elegiac conventions it contains: the underlying vegetation myth, the failure of sexual energy, the intensive use of allusion, the chorus of mourning voices, the drowned sailor, and, in the last section, the reaching for some principle of transformation. Makes it possible to see how much it has been read as an elegy for an entire culture.
THE STRUCTURE OF “THE QUAKER GRAVEYARD AT NANTUCKET”
Marjorie Perloff: “‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’ has frequently been compared to ‘Lycidas.’” Hugh Staples lists the following parallels: the death of a young man to whom the poet has a more than casual yet less than intimate relationship, death by drowning, the unrecovered body, the movement beyond the lament to a larger consideration of contemporary and universal issues, the attempt to answer the apparent futility of the young man’s death (but in terms of Catholic mysticism rather than Protestant militancy). Both Lowell and Milton draw upon classical and biblical sources for their patterns of imagery; both pay homage to individual figures in their native traditions—Thoreau and Melville in Lowell’s case and Theocritus, Bion, and Virgil in Milton’s. Both use place names to invoke the genius loci: for the Hebrides, Namancos, and Bayona, Lowell substitutes Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Walsingham. Even the verse form of “Quaker Graveyard” resembles “Lycidas”: its 194 lines are divided like the 193 lines of “Lycidas” into a loose structure of pentameter lines varied by an occasional trimeter. Each stanza has its own highly intricate rhyme scheme, repeated in only two cases (stanza II and stanza VII), yet differing from each other only slightly. Like Milton, Lowell adapts the canzone for his own purposes. Hugh Staples: “Lowell has made only one radical departure from the old tradition: he has omitted any expression of personal grief and he has made no allusion to his personal career as a poet.”
The most striking transformation, perhaps, is that Lowell has abandoned the conventional decor of the pastoral elegy, the shepherd, nymphs, and personified beings, the echoes of classical poetry, and replaced them explicitly with echoes of New England writers. For example,
The sea was still breaking violently and night (line 2)
Thoreau, Cape Cod: “The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with immigrants, was wrecked on Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks.”
Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, (lines 4–5)
Thoreau, Cape Cod: “I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the clothes were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl . . .”
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lusterless dead-lights
Or cabin windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand (lines 8–12)
Thoreau, Cape Cod: “. . . the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless—merely red and white,—with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.”
And, of course, there are references to Moby-Dick throughout. For the biblical echoes and for the source of “Our Lady of Walsingham,” see the notes in an anthology like the Norton.
PART 1
The description of the drowned sailor, rifted with echoes of Thoreau, is the equivalent to the elegy’s opening cry: “Adonis is dead!” Notice that the speaker is subsumed among the other sailors: “We weight the body . . .” The most conventional elegiac move, the direct vocative, “Sailors . . .” seems to end in a rejection of the convention—the one clear signal of the pastoral ancestry of the poem: “. . . ask for no Orphean lute to pluck life back.” So—a lot of the rhetoric of the poem seems at the very outset to deny poetry as an agency of renewal. Also nature: the body gets heaved “seaward whence it came,” where the sharks—the heel-headed dogfish—are feeding on Ahab. This seems to pick up on “Lycidas”:
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world
And there are elements of elegiac animism—the “hell-bent deity” (I’m not sure of the grammar here, of the corpse? of the sea?), the sea as “earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste,” that word chaste important perhaps to the usual fertility-ritual underpinnings of elegy, since the stanza ends not with the phallic lute of Orpheus, but the dreadnaughts’ guns. Lowell was a conscientious objector to World War II. The phallic guns have in them something of Hamlet’s disgust with sexual appetite. Much darker opening than in either “Lycidas” or “Adonais,” as if the tradition had been soaked in “The Wasteland” or Hart Crane’s “The Tunnel.”
PART 2
Eighteen lines, sonnetlike. No line-end periods, which is part of what gives it its intensity. In this section, Warren Winslow is addressed directly, and the convention of animate sorrow evoked: “terns and gulls tremble at your death in these home waters.” First, the cousin is asked if he hears the presence of the Pequod; then, he is told that the sea cries out at his death in just the way the bones of the Quakers cry at the cruelty and violence of the old whaling industry. Moby Dick has, of course, and Warren Winslow begins to acquire, emblematic, sacrificial, and Christlike motifs. Compared to both Milton and Shelley, though, it would seem that the violence and futility of this death is merely intensified.
PART 3
“All you recovered from Poseidon” picks up on the body “heaved seaward whence it came” in the first stanza. The address to WW is continued and at the end of the section, the poet introduces himself not as a person in the historical present but as a witnessing memory and conscience. He sees the Quakers drowning, hears the fantastic hubris of their cries.
The thought, or dense image-packing, here is complex. It seems that passing time wears away, forgives suffering and evil: “time’s contrition blues whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost in the mad scramble of their lives.” But that kind of wearing away is also seen as sterile: “the harrowed brine is fruitless on the blue beard of the god . . .” (As if Emily Dickinson’s New England ferocity were being evoked: “They say that time assuages. / Time never did assuage.”)
Innocence: the only kind is that of the figureheads on the old sailing ships: “They died when time was open-eyed, wooden, and childish.”
Unlike the attacks on the clergy and the critics in Milton and Shelley, the whole of this poem is, from the beginning, permeated with Lowell’s rage against the greed and violence of his ancestral New England and there seems to be no escape from it.
“Of IS, the whited monster”: Exodus, iii, 14: “And God said to Moses, I AM THAT AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me to you.” Also in much Roman Catholic symbolism Jesus is Iesus Salvator. Lowell borrows all the symbolic glintings and ambiguities that Melville gave the white whale.
PART 4
Clamavimus, O depths:
Psalm cxxx, Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord
Let the sea-gulls wail
For water, for the deep where the high tide
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.
Thoreau, Cape Cod: “I sympathized rather with the wind and waves, as if toss and mangle these poor creatures was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time with awe and pity?”
Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
Ahab is the mast-lashed master, but Odysseus, lashed to the mast to resist the Sirens, is probably also evoked. And the question of poetry gets raised again: Who will be an Orpheus to resurrect Ahab? And there is probably also an echo of Christ as a dancing-master in the English folk tradition. And a pun on “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The poem seems to come to a kind of turn here. “This is the end of the whale-road” and again “This is the end of running on the waves” may mean: this graveyard is where it all ends. But it also seems to supply historical distance—the distance that mourning requires if it is to be transformed into something else—to say: this is where it all ended. But the sea itself remains a ferocious emblem of the restless meaninglessness of human endeavor:
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,
The beach increasing, its enormous snout
Sucking the ocean’s side.
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water.
PART 5
This is a culmination of the theme of violence. After saying in the last part that we have come to the end of the whale road, he imagines the gutting and disemboweling of the whales and the corruption overrunning the earth. This passage seems particularly to echo Milton—
Beyond treeswept Nantucket, and Wood’s Hole
And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
but instead of imagining Warren Winslow being brought home from “beyond the stormy Hebrides,” as Lycidas is, he is imagined as being complicit in the whale killing—the description is adapted from the “Stubbs Kills a Whale” chapter of Moby-Dick—and the killing is made to seem at once like torture, like the wounding of Christ, and like a kind of sexual violence: “the death-lance churns into the sanctuary.” And here the violence, real, imagined, historic, present, nightmarish, a metaphor for human greed, for the food chain, for sexuality, has become so intense that the poem utters its first prayer because it needs some place to put the violence: “Hide our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.”
PART 6
See the Norton notes for Lowell’s source, Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture. This is the startling passage in the poem. It, in effect, reverses the pastoral convention. Where the pastoral had been located in a mourning but idyllic landscape, from which it spoke out in anger against some social evil, Lowell’s elegy speaks from the middle of loss, suffering, violence, and evil and then pauses to invoke a pastoral alternative.
Again the sailor is addressed, but by now “sailor” has acquired a symbolic resonance that clearly includes the speaker and the reader. It has come to mean something like “pilgrim” and Walsingham was a place of pilgrimage where the “dragging pain” of the poem can be put down.
Commentators have focused on the relative emptiness of the symbol. It “expressionless, expresses God.” It goes past “castled Sion,” that is, Zion, that is, any imagination of a political state that could reflect divine justice. It even goes beyond the cross at Calvary and the crib at Bethlehem.
In “Lycidas” there was the trinity of judging father, nourishing but limited mother, and lost son, which seems to get picked up in different ways throughout the elegiac tradition. Hence Sacks’s idea that successful mourning duplicates the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Here is a mother to think about.
And what about the question of poetry? Does this passage answer the question, “Who will dance the mast-lashed master of Leviathans up . . . ?” This seems a place to leave pain and the Virgin seems a representation that is utterly simple and plain and points past representation.
Perloff: “Although ‘Our Lady of Walsingham’ is meant to provide a positive alternative to the sins the poet has been denouncing so vehemently, it fails to cohere with the rest of the poem . . . Within the larger context of the whole elegy, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham stands in sharp opposition to the Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, and it is hard to see how these two symbolic locales can be fused.”
Hass: “I imagine for a lot of young writers this was the place where they learned how far you could go away from the poem and still be in it . . . Lowell is not after sacramental mediation but a contemplative peace beyond any manifestation in the flesh, so there is no resolution of the conflict between Nantucket and Walsingham; there is irresolvable tension, and it’s in this way that ‘Quaker Graveyard’ is finally a Manichean poem.”
PART 7
In this last section, the Atlantic is addressed. In the beginning of the poem, the ocean is the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste. He is also from whence we came. In the third section he is associated with Poseidon and with blue: “harrowed brine is fruitless on the blue beard of the god.” Also warships rock “in the hand of the great God, where time’s contritions blue . . .” So there are two gods: god and God, Poseidon and Jonathan Edwards’s Jehovah. Here the Atlantic is “fouled with the blue sailors,” who are “sea monsters, upward angel, downward fish”—echo of Milton. And the Lord God is something else and it is what Lowell ends up identifying with. As in a lot of cosmologies, he’s had to split off the good God from the bad one. Here the Creator Spirit is one thing and the blue killer of the Atlantic another:
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life.
And blue-lunged combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
This split between some kind of naturalism and some longing for a transcendent principle to identify with is an old imagination of the structure of things. The Gnostics imagined creator-monsters, archons, and an unembodied God of pure light, Blake called the creator-God Nobadaddy, and so on. Lowell’s imagination of the split between the way we can imagine nature and spirit, good and evil, seems to be the same one that Ginsberg represents at the end of “Kaddish,” where there is an unresolved debate between the voices of scavenging crows and the voice of praise for the (male) principle of the holy:
Caw caw caw caw caw caw
Lord Lord Lord Lord Lord Lord
Caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord
“HOWL” AND “KADDISH”
Carl Solomon is not dead—and “Howl” has often been read as a shadow elegy for Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, a subject he finally broached directly in “Kaddish”—he is merely incarcerated, but “Howl” has many elements of pastoral elegy. And for all the ways in which Lowell looks back to Milton, there are a number of ways in which Ginsberg looks back to Shelley. The “angel-headed hipsters” in part one are, in a strikingly modernized Shelleyan language, “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.” They are a procession of mourners, violent seekers of transcendence. As in the classical elegy, Ginsberg turns, in the Moloch section, to denunciation before he can reconnect to his art, and at the end of the poem Carl Solomon shows up at his door, as if emerged from the sea.