Robert Lowell

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

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 cans,has two chi...

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, yuck-...

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 sparrowsweath...

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 The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions...

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...

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
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,blossoms on our magnolia ignitethe mor...

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,

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

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 hangman's-k...

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 skeptic,his ...