259“The season’s ill”
America’s Angst and Robert Lowell’s
ity the planet, all joy gone / from this
sweet volcanic cone.” It ’s summer 1965 on the Maine coast for America’s classic
twentieth-century poet Robert Lowell (1917–1977). Invited by Lyndon Johnson
to a White House Arts Festival, Lowell publicly declines in anguish at the esca-
lating Vietnam war. “Waking Early Sunday Morning” (from Near the Ocean),
written in the Northeast at that troubled moment, begins just before dawn with
a cry to our Northwest rivers.
O to break loose, like the Chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall—
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.This wild freedom would be something genuine, by human measure heroic
and truly tragic (though another tragedy’s occurred since then—chinook runs
now endangered). Lowell habitually goes to nature to test his passion: spawning
salmon, a hacked sperm whale, a mother skunk, or swinging oriole ’s nest.
When “my body wakes / to feel the unpolluted joy” of a Sunday morning,
little is there to grace his life, as in Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” where
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