Robert Lowell

(for Elizabeth Bishop)Nautilus Island's hermitheiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;her sheep still graze above the sea
Her son's a bishop
Her farmer is first selectman in our village;she's in her dotage
Thirstin...

Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the airand the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth
IA brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,-The sea was still breaking violently a...

What was is… since 1930;the boys in my old gangare senior partners
They start upbald like baby birdsto embrace retirement
At the altar of surrender,
I met youin the hour of credulity

The night attendant, a B
U
sophomore,rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy headpropped on The Meaning of Meaning
He catwalks down our corridor

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye(Truly Jehovah's bow
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—why are they no help to me nowI want to makesomething imagined, not recalled
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light
But sometime...

My old flame, my wife
Remember our lists of birds
One morning last summer,
I droveby our house in Maine