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;

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…

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 stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.On the circles, green statues ride like South American…

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…

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

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-wormingin pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's "
hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the manscavenging filth in the back alley trash…

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had—it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the…

С тугими спицами этот штурвал
бередит болячки и язвы земли.На Потомаке, по-лебяжьи белы,
катера рассекают сернистый вал.Ныряют выдры и мех свой топорщат,
еноты мясо в протоке полощут.По кругу статуи, как в Америке Южной…

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night,

An old man in Concord forgets to go to morning service.
He falls asleep, while reading Vergil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince.
The sun is blue and scarlet on my page,
And yuck-a, yuck-a,…

Gone now the baby's nurse,a lioness who ruled the roostand made the Mother cry.
She used to tiegobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze—three months they hung like soggy toaston our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English…

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer houseI“I won’t go with you.
I want to stay with Grandpa!” That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner.…

Work-table, litter, books and standing lamp,
plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom---
but I am living in a tidied room,
for ten nights now I've felt the creeping damp…

Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
The old South Boston Aquarium standsin a Sahara of snow now.
Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

[February 1954]Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks....
When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was…

September twenty-second,
Sir: today I answer.
In the latter part of May,
Hard on our Lord’s Ascension, it began To be more sensible.

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its…

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn.
But where

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."- Schopenhauer"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life…