Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

AMERICA’S ANGST AND ROBERT LOWELL’S 261

This is the end of running on the waves;

We are poured out like water.

The whale draws a fury of words, Lowell’s way of scathing human rapine and
with it the war’s:

Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

Where the morning stars sing out together.

Beginning his poem with Genesis, man’s “dominion” over earth and earth’s
creatures, Lowell echoes God ’s taunt to Job, “Where wast thou... When the
morning stars sang together?” and ends by doubting God ’s covenant.

You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

And breathed into his face the breath of life,

And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.

Such a voice, turning Adam’s dust into ocean slime, rolling waves into gaping
whale-mouths, could be Melville ’s in Moby-Dick. The rhymes alone savage
Creation—“slime” against “time,” “knife” / “life,” “kill” / “will,” humankind
hopeless after the Fall and Flood.
Though we don’t think of Lowell as cleaving to nature, like Hopkins,
Frost, and Roethke, ocean and above all animals gave him poet ’s plenty if
not God ’s. Just as Yeats sees “Another emblem there!” in “sudden thunder of
the mounting swan,” Lowell finds nature acting out his own and the world ’s
condition.
In college Lowell copied Hopkins into a notebook, “O the mind, mind has
mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” At thirty-two he
suffered a first bout of manic depression, and later found images for it in “Skunk
Hour.” “The season’s ill,” he says, “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.” Nothing’s
authentic anymore in this Maine coastal town, at night “nobody’s here,”

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire.

Under the puritanic “spire of the Trinitarian Church” he spots lunatic, satanic
“moonstruck eyes’ red fire.” To gain some purely physical clarity,

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—