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Life Studies
by Robert Lowell
Life Studies Conventions
Relationships - Life Studies
Conventions in Life Studies
Analysis of Text and Language - Life Studies
When responding to the prescribed texts
Life Studies - page references
Bibliography
Life Studies Conventions
Context
Considered by many as a confessional poet for his intimate, personal accounts of mental illness and family tragedies, Lowell’s Life Studies published in 1959, reflected his historical context as did his allegorical and politically motivated poems. A rebel determined to be a great poet and imbued with Miltonic vigour, Lowell’s view of history is informed by ‘Nietzschean fatalism’ and therefore although he was a Liberal opposed the Vietnam war there are tensions in his rejection of self righteous American political poetry and his view that great leaders like Alexander the Great and Napoleon succeeded due to their belief in their own power. (Kirsch, A. 2005. pp 49 -50)
Text
Lowell’s poems, even the most personal and prosaic in their use of language reflect his intensive reflection, refinement of imagery and revision. Lowell creates an interpretation not merely a portrait in his free verse which is ‘sonically dense and full of rich vowels’ (Kirsch. p 20)
Paradoxically Lowell’s best autobiographical poems are the most stylized in their rhythms and metaphors. Unlike Modernist poets such as T.S Eliot, Lowell focused on confrontational honesty instead of ambiguity and impersonality to express the modern condition. Life Studies, a product of Lowell’s middle style, has greater naturalness of expression than his earlier artificial and self-conscious poetic style. The aesthetic dominates the therapeutic in his continued application of New Criticism rigour that enabled him to achieve honesty through skilful manipulation of images, rhythms, inclusions, omissions, concealments and fictions.
‘Grandparents’ is perhaps the most gentle and closest to confessional poetry being a representation of a deeply felt childish love which Lowell balances with the inclusion of socially significant names and settings; ‘the farm, entitled Char-de-sa /in the social register’ placing the poem in the wider context of the American aristocracy. ‘Commander Lowell’ and ‘Terminal Days at Beverley Farms’ are satires of Lowell’s father and his social class. ‘Waking in the Blue’ ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ and ‘Man and Wife’ share a similarly satirical tone but the subject is himself and his relationships. Lowell’s reflections on accompanying his mother’s body back to America from Italy in ‘Sailing home from Rappallo’ resembles ‘Grandparents’ in being predominantly suffused with affection and loss unlike the mocking tone of his memories of his father and himself which include ‘Skunk Hour ‘ the bleakest of all the poems in ‘Life Studies’
Relationships– Life Studies
Grandparents
Lowell projects a common experience, albeit mediated through his privileged Bostonian background, in detached reflections on himself, his connections with his family and his context. His detailed observations recreate a passing order; his grandfather’s Pierce Arrow motorcar garaged in the ‘horse-stall’, the road not paved and his grandmother wearing a driving veil is ‘like a Mohammedan’. Lowell’s reference to the seventeenth century poet Henry Vaughan ‘They’re all gone into a world of light’ contributes to the poems ‘elegiac quality’ (Spur, B. 1992. p3)
The gentle and affectionate tone of the poem includes a self deprecatory reference to himself during the ‘throwaway and shaggy span/of adolescence’ his grandfather ‘still waves his stick/like a policeman’ reminiscent of a vaudeville comedian. Lowell’s retrospective view of himself is more critical with the repeated ‘the farm’s my own’ and reference to spoiling another season by secluding himself indoors. His use of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 as the historical context of his birth contextualizes the experience and belongs to Lowell’s practice of moving between the personal and the public. ‘I hold an Illustrated London News’/disloyal still /I doodle handlebar /moustaches on the last Russian Czar’.
Lowell’s use of irony saves the poem from sentimentality and he reveals the elegance of that past was dependent on a denial of the ordinary. ‘ …Grandpa, dipping sugar for us both /once spilled his demitasse./His favourite ball , the number three,/still hides the coffee stains’. Lowell’s affection and loss, even if dramatized, still carry conviction. ’Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!/Tears smut my fingers’.
Commander Lowell
Lowell’s conversational style, listing of trivial details and rhyme scheme re enforce his satire of the pretentions of upper class Bostonian society including his own family. His reflections on his father ‘once successful enough to be lost /in a mob of ruling class Bostonians’ lack the empathic and affection tone of ‘Grandparents’ and the only grudging praise comes too late in the concluding stanza of the poem, ‘As early as 1928, /he owned a house converted to oil, …./And once /nineteen, the youngest ensign in his class, he was ‘the old man’ of a gunboat on the Yangtze’.
Lowell presents himself and his mother in opposition to his father who is depicted as a pompous and ineffectual man. The irony is unforgiving, the Commander is an outsider on the golf club who
‘took four shots with his putter to sink his putt./’Bob’, they said, ‘golf’s a game you really ought to know how to play,/if you play at all.’ He was ‘never one of the crowd and at the Sunday Yachting Club. His ‘…piker speculations!’ threaten the family ‘...In three years/ he squandered sixty thousand dollars’. Lowell and his mother do not fare much better, himself ‘bristling and manic/skulked in the attic,’ while she ‘a victim of hysterical unmarried panic’ was ‘still her father’s daughter’. The detail and evocative verbs again clearly convey the common experience of a dysfunctional family, ‘While Mother dragged herself to bed alone, /read Menninger,/and grew more and more suspicious,/he grew defiant…. slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule /across a pad of graphs ‘.
Terminal Days at Beverley Farms
This poem further develops Lowell’s ironic criticism of his father through reflections on his father’s death. His father’s pomposity and materialism is represented by his new Chevrolet, and the futility of his life, devoid of passion and dominated by status, is summed up in Lowell’s recollection of his death. The poem begins with seemingly benign view of the older man, slightly tipsy and jovial but the implicit comparison between the man and the ‘portly, uncomfortable boulder’ that ‘bulked in the garden’s centre’ creates resonances with previous descriptions of the Commander as always being unconnected and out of place. Once again his father is immaculately dressed ‘...cream dinner-jacket,/and indigo cummerbund.’ But Stanza One ends with an ominous and ironic reference to illness and death in ‘...his newly dieted figure was vitally trim’. The Second Stanza builds on this unease with the reference to ‘Boston doctors’ and the rail road tracks that allow access to their aid. Death is present in the landscape in the simile ‘like a double-barrel shotgun’ describing the tracks and the ’scarlet late August sumac, /multiplying like cancer/at their garden’s border’.
Lowell builds tension but trivializes the event by delaying the prosaic statement ‘Father had had two coronaries’, until the opening of Stanza Three. He proceeds to satirize the triviality of his father’s concerns, ‘his best friend was his little black Chevy/garaged like a sacrificial steer/with gilded hooves.’ Status and money are still the only criteria and the façade of success is still maintained in Stanza Four with daily trips to the appropriately named ‘…Maritime Museum in Salem’, complete with his ‘ivory slide-rule’, ‘calc’ and ‘trig’ books.
The concluding stanza lacks the warmth and regret of his farewells to his grandparents and mother. The language is objective, concise and factual, the tone detached. ‘Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting’/ …’After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling, /his last words to Mother were: / I feel awful.’
Sailing Home from Rapallo
Lowell’s farewell to his mother, despite ironic touches, is much more affectionate and completes the insights into his connection with his family. His direct speech to her is factual but reveals his sense of loss ‘Your nurse could only speak Italian, / but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, /and tears ran down my cheeks’. His use of alliteration, sensory imagery, simile, evocative verbs and adjectives creates a more eloquent tone as he describes their journey home to New England. ‘...the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova /was breaking into fiery flower. /The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds /blasting like jackhammers across/ the spumante – bubbling wake of our liner’.
However, as in ‘Grandparents’ Lowell avoids sentimentality through reductive irony, contrasting her heroic lying in state ‘Mother travelled first-class in the hold, /her Risorgimento black and gold Casket/was like Napoleon’…. with their destination the New England winter, ‘our family cemetery in Dunbarton /lay under the White Mountains/in sub-zero weather/Dour and dark against the blinding snow drifts,’
His reductive treatment of the her pretentiousness is extended by the inclusion of his father, ‘The only ‘unhistoric’ soul to come here/was Father,’ whose Latin translation of the Lowell family motto ‘Occasionem cognosce, /seemed too businesslike and pushing here,’ and ‘In grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, /Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. /The corpse/was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil’. Lowell’s capitalization of the word is an ironic reference to his parent’s loveless relationship and the ‘tinfoil’ reflects the superficiality of their aspirations.
Waking in the Blue
Lowell’s focus shifts to himself and although the poem is still confessional in nature, by revealing his struggle with mental illness, it lacks none of the irony of the three previous poems. He characteristically combines the private and public world in experiences as a patient in a mental institution placed in the wider satire of the American aristocracy represented by his fellow patients. The opening stanzas are again acutely observed; education, wealth and class are no barrier to madness as Lowell says in the final stanza ‘… pinched indigenous faces/of these thoroughbred mental cases, /
The poem is balanced between an overview of the institution and patients ‘…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.) Lowell’s controlled use of design and style are seen in this use of parenthesis and suggest a conspiratorial aside to the reader satirizing not only Catholicism but himself, once a fanatical Catholic, and continuing his reductive reference to the pretensions of his class.
Lowell’s satirical use of incongruous juxtapositions is as humorous as it is reductive – the kingly profile and the golf cap, sperm whale and Louis XV1 mock not only these men but the pretentiousness of humanity itself. He contrasts two madmen; ‘Stanley’ a former ’….Harvard all American fullback, / (if such were possible!) …. ‘A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap, worn all day, all night/ he thinks only of his figure’, and ‘Bobbie’ ‘Procellian ’29,a replica of Louis XV1/without the wig -/ redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,/ as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit/and horses at chairs’.
Nor does Lowell spare himself in the closing stanza of the poem where his objective tone and choice of language strengthen the impact of his confession preventing any self pity. This stanza is more brutally honest than the preceding ones and ‘Absence! My heart grows tense/as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. / (This is the house for the ‘mentally ill’.) Here Lowell’s use of parenthesis and brackets reduce a potentially melodramatic comment to almost an afterthought. He belongs here just as surely as Stanley and Bobbie. ‘After a hearty New England breakfast, / I weigh two hundred pounds/ …. Cock of the walk, I strut my turtle–necked French sailor’s jersey/before the metal shaving mirrors, /
The trite adjective ‘hearty’ has resonances of contextual euphuisms used to deny the reality of mental illness. The brutal, self mockery and simple language of the closing lines are confessional but challenge the hypocrisy of his contemporaries. ‘We are all old timers, /each of us holds a locked razor. ‘
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Lowell’s own past is treated with self mockery once again and set in the wider context of America in the ‘tranquilized fifties’ when he was briefly imprisoned in New York City Jail for refusing to fight in WW2. ’I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,/and made my manic statement/telling off the state and the president, and then/sat waiting for sentence in the bull pen/beside a negro boy with curlicues/of marijuana in his hair.’
Lowell’s strategy of selecting representative inmates among the prisoners resembles ‘Waking in the Blue’ in style and tone. Here is a much lighter mockery of self and society. The opening lines subvert the reader’s expectation of prison as terrifying and sordid, this could be occurring anywhere, ‘Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-wormimg/in pyjamas fresh from the washer each morning’. The America of this setting is equally innocuous ‘even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two young children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, /and is ‘a young Republican.’
The poem continues in the mood until the final stanza ‘Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, /a jaundice-yellow (‘it’s really a tan’)/and fly weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.’ Even brutality and violence becomes entertaining through the colloquialisms, parenthesis and details. ‘He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, /the Hollywood pimps, to his diet./Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,/ they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.’
Lowell uses the same techniques in the opening of the final stanza and maintaining the lighter mood intensifies the shock of the closing lines where the shambling figure of former crime boss Czar Lepke brings reality and precipitates Lowell’s fear of madness. The objective adjectives and verbs are detailed and chilling. ‘Flabby, bald, lobotomized,/he drifted in a sheepish calm,/where no agonized reappraisal/jarred his concentration on the electric chair-/ Lowell identifies with Lepke because he is imprisoned in a metaphorical sense, deprived of his identity and agency not only by society but by his own mind, ‘hanging like an oasis in his air /of lost connections….’ Here he like Lepke can only be freed by death.
Man and Wife
An intimate reflection on the connections between his past, his mental condition and his marriage Man and Wife shares some of the gentleness and warmth of Grandparents. The direct address to his silent wife is not a satire like many of confessional poems but he does use the personal to write of common experiences of alienation and loss. Here they are compounded by their shared struggle with Lowell’s manic episodes ‘All night I have held your hand,/as if you had/a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad-/its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye-/and dragged me home alive……’ . As in ‘Commander Lowell’ Lowell choice of verbs recreates the nuances of the relationship, here however tenderness mediates the difficulties. The partial rhymes lend a lyrical quality to the verse that contributes to the reflective mood.
The lengthy opening stanza places the moment in the context of the past, the past of his own childhood ‘we lie on Mother’s bed,/the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;/in broad daylight her glided bed-post shine,/abandoned, almost Dionysian.’ Lowell’s play on words ‘lie’ ‘dyes’ ‘abandoned’ places the present in the shadow of the defeated expectations and futile pretensions of the past. The qualified ‘almost Dionysian’, suggests this is important only to those immediately involved just as the capitalization and misspelled family name does on his mother’s casket in ‘Sailing Home from Rappello.’
Lowell’s recollection of the past and their courtship is mildly self-deprecatory, he is less than a heroic figure, ’ … and I,/ once hand on glass/and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rhavs in the heat/of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet-/too boiled and shy/and poker-faced to make a pass’. He uses a comparison between the past and present too in his comparison of his wife as she was and is now concluding the poem with the final stanza where powerlessness, love and loss vie for dominance. ‘Now twelve years later, you turn your back. / Sleepless, you hold/your pillow to your hollows like a child’. Failure and loss are implicit in the connotations of ‘hollows’ and intensified by the simile ‘like a child’. By concluding the poem with a symbolic reference to the Atlantic Ocean, Lowell suggests his understanding of the power of her love and concern and the immensity of the forces ranged against them.
Skunk Hour
Considered one of Lowell’s greatest poems ‘Skunk Hour’ is more compressed and indirect than his more colloquial novelistic style in others poems in ‘Life Studies’. The regular structure of eight six line stanzas directs the focus of the poem and its cast of New England characters towards an increasingly menacing future. In the manner of satire each character is undermined; the ‘hermit heiress’ is ’in her dotage’, her cottage is ‘Spartan’ and her investments are at the cost of community ‘she buys up all/the eyesores facing her shore/and lets them fall.’ The catalogue of isolation and decay continues with the absent ‘summer millionaire’ his ‘nine-knot yawl/was auctioned off to a lobsterman’. The factual, sparse detail leaves little hope of social or economic recovery as Lowell concludes the first half of the poem and sets his own experience in a wider context. He adds wry humour with the ‘fairy decorator’ who considers marriage because ‘there is no money in his work’.
It is onto this stage of hopelessness and isolation that Lowell enters the four concluding stanzas which become progressively bleaker, reflecting Lowell’s deteriorating mental condition. Allusions and religious references within a sordid contemporary context are permeated by the imagery of death and decay. ‘One dark night’ establishes the mood and suggests the growing darkness in his own mind as he spies on the parked cars and the coupling of their inhabitants. The clichéd lyrics deprive their unions of any romance ‘the radio bleats/ ‘Love, oh careless love’. Lowell’s use of personification, the ‘hill’s skull’ has biblical resonances of ‘the dark night of the soul’ from St John of the Cross and the site of Christ’s crucifixion, Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls. Lowell’s incongruous juxtaposition of nautical and funeral language builds tension and unease which escalates in pace and imagery into the damnation of Stanza Six ‘my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, /as if my hand were at its throat…/I myself am hell.’/nobody’s here –‘. The divided consciousness of madness is revealed by the objective observation of his suicidal gesture and the lines have resonances of the Devil in Marlowe’s ‘Dr Faustus’ and Milton’s Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’. (Krish. p 31- 32)
This nightmare is invaded by a mother skunk and her kittens, themselves seemingly hellish creatures. ‘They march on their soles up Main Street: /white stripes, moonstruck eyes ’red fire /under the chalk–dry and spar spire/of the Trinitarian Church’. Here in Stanza Seven too Lowell uses the technique of playing on the connotations of words to introduce an ambiguous subtext. The presence of these animals, outcasts like he is, is a wry recognition of a shared struggle for survival. ‘She drops her wedge –head in a cup/of sour cream… /and will not scare.’
Conventions in Life Studies
- place & context – historical, political and cultural
- privileged ideas and perspectives & voice – sense of person
- a concern for ‘truth telling’ and concealment
- focus on fact
- allusions to religion, art and literature
- memory & relations– insight into past, present, future
- writing and reflection to understand connections between past, present and future
Analysis of Text and Language – Life Studies
Comment on:
- commentary of the passing of the old order in America including the focus on ceremony and order to deny reality.
- isolation and alienation behind facade of success and respectability
- satire of Boston’s social elite - positions of privilege
- the arts and religion informing values – biblical allusions
- writing and reflection as means of self understanding.
- use of confessional free verse and satire
- evocative use of detail, adjectives and verbs
- the historical past contextualising the present.
When responding to the prescribed texts
Refer to the Syllabus requirements, Prescription rubric and HSC Markers’ comments. Life writing over the years has been subject to contextual influences.
Integrate the ‘how’ of the language in your comments on narrative structure, characterisation, setting, mood, themes, pace and tension. HSC Markers regularly remark on the ability of better students to critically consider the concepts and evaluate how the texts represent their concerns. The more sophisticated, informed and fluent student responses demonstrate control of language, a detailed knowledge of the set texts and related material that are integrated and interpreted in keeping with the requirements of each question.
The creative writing component of the HSC exam too should reflect an extensive knowledge of the genre, the set texts and independent research reflected in the original imaginative response to the question. Prepared answers rarely have the sophistication or relevancy required for Extension 1.
Student activities
- How is Lowell’s context in nineteen fifties America and his concerns for personal freedom and honesty represented in the structure and language of the poems? Choose four and respond in detail.
- Research Lowell and Life Studies. Analyse and evaluate how and why Lowell combines confessional poetry with satire in four poems.
- Life Studies addresses enduring and context specific issues. Discuss with detailed reference to three poems and two related texts.
- Choose a socio-political or cultural context and write an interview with a contemporary poet analysing the value of confessional poetry.
- Write a monologue that addresses some of the issues raised in Life Studies.
Life Studies – page references
| Poem:Technique/Convention | Example | Reference/Quote |
|---|---|---|
| Grandparents | ||
| Satire of privileged background Nostalgia for passing order Warm tone Elegiac quality Gentle humour, Retrospective Historical context/public & personal Wider political context Irony |
Pierce-Arrow motorcar, | ‘Pierce Arrow motorcar …..horse-stall’ the road not paved |
| Grandmother’s costume | ‘……like a Mohammedan’ | |
| Grandfather’s actions reminiscent of a vaudeville comedian | ‘still waves his stick/ like a policeman’ | |
| Seventeenth century poet Henry Vaughan | ‘They’re all gone into a world of light’ | |
| Self deprecation | ‘throwaway and shaggy span/ of adolescence’ | |
| Critical repetition | ‘the farm’s my own’ | |
| Bolshevik Revolution, contextualizes the experience and belongs to Lowell’s practice of moving between the personal and the public | ‘I hold …. Russian Czar’. | |
| Description of loss avoids sentimentality by associating the elegance with denial of the ordinary. | ‘ …Grandpa, dipping.. stains’. ’Grandpa…my fingers’. |
|
| Commander Lowell | ||
| Satire Conversational style Listing of trivial details Rhyme scheme re enforce |
Satire of the pretentions of upper class Bostonian society including his own family. | ‘once successful enough to be lost /in a mob of ruling class Bostonians’ |
| Objective, critical tone Irony |
Reflections on his father | ‘ took four shots ….you play at all.’ |
| Grudging praise | Concluding stanza | ‘never one ….Sunday Yachting Club. |
| Balance /irony | Lowell and mother in opposition to his father | ‘…piker speculations!’ …. sixty thousand dollars’ |
| Detail/evocative verbs -common experience |
A dysfunctional family, | ‘As early as 1928, …the Yangtze’. |
| ‘bristling .. attic,’ ‘a victim… daughter’. |
||
| ‘While Mother … graphs ‘. | ||
| Terminal Days at Beverly Farms | ||
| Satire Conversational style |
Lowell’s recollection of his father’s death satirise the pomposity and materialism of his class and himself - represented by his new Chevrolet and daily trips to the Museum. | ‘his best friend…hooves.’ Status and money are still the only criteria and the façade of success is still maintained in Stanza Four ‘…Maritime Museum in Salem’… ‘ivory slide-rule’, and ‘calc’… ‘trig’ books. |
| Objective, critical tone Irony |
Deceptively benign view of the terminally ill father slightly tipsy and jovial implicit in the reference to the setting. Ironic reference to illness and death. |
‘portly , uncomfortable boulder’ …. ‘bulked in the garden’s centre’ ‘..his newly dieted figure was vitally trim’. |
| Death is present in the landscape. | ‘Boston doctors’…‘like a double-barrel shotgun’ ’scarlet late August sumac… border’. | |
| Symbolic use of Setting Simile |
The futility is suggested by his father being dressed immaculately. | ‘..cream dinner-jacket,/and indigo cummerbund. |
| Listing of trivial details Detached tone Objective language, concise and factual. |
Lowell builds tension but trivializes the death | ‘Father had had two coronaries’, ‘Father’s death…feel awful.’ |
| Sailing Home from Rappallo | ||
| Gentle satire Warm tone Alliteration, sensory imagery, simile, evocative verbs and adjectives |
Direct address to Mother and the description of their journey home to New England provides insight into family and his sense of loss | ‘Your nurse …. cheeks’. ‘the whole shoreline … our liner’. |
| Irony Historical context/public & personal Wider political context Contrast |
Lowell avoids sentimentality through reductive irony. | ‘Mother travelled ….Napoleon’s. |
| Capitalisation | Her lying in state, name, their destination, and the inclusion of his father suggest the futility of their pretentions and their loveless marriage. |
‘our family cemetery.. drifts. ‘The only ‘unhistoric’.. here,’ ‘In grandiloquent… LOVEL./ The corpse/was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil’. |
| Waking in the Blue | ||
| Confessional poetry Irony Private and public world |
Lowell’s focus shifts to himself revealing his struggles in the context of the American aristocracy. | ‘… pinched indigenous ….mental cases, |
| Accurate observation and evocative use of detail Balanced between guards and patients |
His experiences as a patient in a mental institution contain a wider satire of the American aristocracy represented by his fellow patients, himself and the pretentiousness of humanity itself. | ‘…hours ….Church.) |
| Reductive use of juxtapositions. Conversational style – use of asides, controlled use of design. |
Lowell too is an object of satire. Lowell’s potentially melodramatic comment becomes an afterthought. Lowell satires contextual denial of the reality of mental illness. |
‘Stanley’….Harvard….his figure’. ‘Bobbie’… ‘Procellian ’29,….chairs. ‘ |
| Brutal honesty in objective tone, choice of language, confessional poetry devoid of self pity. Parenthesis, brackets, trite adjectives prevent self pity. |
Absence! .... ill’.) ‘After a… mirrors, ‘We are… razor. |
|
| Memories of West Street and Lepke | ||
| Confessional poetry Irony, lighter tone. Subversion of expectations |
Lowell’s self mockery is in the context of America which is relatively benign. | ‘tranquilized fifties’ ’I was … his hair.’ ‘even the …Republican.’ |
| Private and public world Balanced between guards and patients Conversational style – use of asides, controlled use of design. |
Lowell combines self mockery with a selection of representative prison inmates. The poem continues in a lighter mood. |
‘Only teaching…morning’ ‘Strolling,… fruit.’ |
| Accurate observation and evocative use of detail Reductive use of juxtapositions. Brutal honesty in objective tone, detailed, chilling adjectives and verbs prevent self pity. |
The closing lines come as a shocking contrast and Czar Lepke precipitates Lowell’s fear of madness. Freedom comes only from death. | ‘He tried… blue.’ ‘Flabby, …lost connections.’ |
Bibliography
- Kirsch, A. ‘The Wounded Surgeon’. 2005. W.W. Norton & Company. New York.
- Spur, B. ‘The Poetry of Robert Lowell’ 1992. Fast Books. Wild & Wooley. Sydney.
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