260 PART THREE
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness,filling religion’s void. For Lowell,
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life,driven by sinewy rhythms and bitter rhymes.
Stemming from New England ’s old Yankee families, Lowell grew up on a
shabby-genteel branch of the tree, his Navy father ineffectual, his mother frus-
trated and overbearing. At eighteen he nurtured “the spiritual side of being a
poet” as it faced “the actualities of the world,” though it took years to steady that
stance. Studying poetry and classics in college, he ’d walk country roads with
a friend, “talking every step of the way about ourselves or about our writing.”
The spring before graduating, Lowell married an aspiring novelist and con-
verted to Catholicism. During the war, after trying to enlist, he declared himself
a conscientious objector and served five months in jail, looking out “through
sooty clothesline entanglements / and bleaching khaki tenements” at the Hud-
son River and yammering metaphysics with Abramowitz, “so vegetarian, / he
wore rope soles and preferred fallen fruit.”
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” begun in 1943, like Eliot ’s The Waste
Land works myth, religion, history, geography and nature, literary and per-
sonal memory into Anglo-American prophecy. Lowell moves via Poseidon and
Orpheus, Milton’s Lycidas, Melville ’s Ahab and Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Cape
Cod, Quaker sailors, Adam, Noah, Job, Jonah, Babylon, Psalms, Christ, the
Lord God, and Nantucket surf. Dedicated to his cousin lost at sea in the war,
the poem keeps surging in muscular passages and high language mixed with
low. While working on it, Lowell spoke of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “inebri-
ated exuberance.”
“Why doesn’t Bobby write about the sea?” Aunt Sarah asked from the deck
of her yacht off the Massachusetts coast. “It ’s so pretty.” But he did, wrestling
its wild violence:
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net.Psalms now and then possess the sailors’ cry: