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 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. From Atlantic Unbound: Flashbacks: "The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell" (June 18, 2003) Writings by and about Robert Lowell offer insight into the life and poetry of a tormented legend. |
Fourth of July in Maine
Another summer! Our Independence(For Harriet Winslow) by Robert Lowell ..... Day Parade, all innocence of children's costumes, helps resist the communist and socialist. Five nations: Dutch, French, Englishmen, Indians, and we, who held Castine, rise from their graves in combat gear— world-losers elsewhere, conquerors here! Civil Rights clergy face again the scions of the good old strain, the poor who always must remain poor and Republicans in Maine, upholders of the American Dream, who will not sink and cannot swim— O Emersonian self-reliance, O lethargy of Russian peasants! High noon. Each child has won his blue, red, yellow ribbon, and our statue, a dandyish Union Soldier, sees his fields reclaimed by views and spruce— he seems a convert to old age, small, callous, elbowed off the stage, while the canned martial music fades from scene and green—no more parades! Blue twinges of mortality remind us the theocracy drove in its stakes here to command the infinite, and gave this land a ministry that would have made short work of Christ, the Son of God, and then exchanged His crucifix, hardly our sign, for politics. This white Colonial frame house, willed downward, Dear, from you to us, still matters, the Americas' best artifact produced en masse. The founders' faith was in decay, and yet their building seems to say: "O every time I take a breath, My God you are the air I breathe." New England, everywhere I look, old letters crumble from the Book, China trade rubble, one more line unraveling from the dark design spun by God and Cotton Mather— our bel età dell' oro, another bright thing thinner than a cobweb, caught in Calvinism's ebb. Dear Cousin, life is much the same, though only fossils know your name here since you left this solitude, gone, as the Christians say, for good. Your house, still outwardly in form lasts, though no emissary come to watch the garden running down, or photograph the propped-up barn. If memory is genius, you had Homer's, enough gossip to repeople Trollope's Barchester, nurse, negro, diplomat, down-easter, cousins kept up with, nipped, corrected, kindly, majorfully directed, though family furniture, decor, and rooms redone meant almost more. How often when the telephone brought you to us from Washington, we had to look around the room to find the objects you would name— lying there, ten years paralyzed, half blind, no voice unrecognized, not trusting in the afterlife, teasing us for a carving knife. O high New England summer, warm and fortified against the storm by nightly nips you once adored, though never going overboard, Harriet, when you used to play your chosen Nadia Boulanger Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach's precursors on the Magnavox. Blue-ribboned, blue-jeaned, named for you, our daughter cartwheels on the blue— may your proportion strengthen her to live through the millennial year Two Thousand, and like you possess friends, independence, and a house, herself God's plenty, mistress of your tireless sedentary love. Her two angora guinea pigs are nibbling seed, the news, and twigs— untroubled, petrified, atremble, a mother and her daughter, humble, giving, idle and sensitive. Few animals will let them live. Only a vegetarian God could look on them and call them good. Man's poorest cousins, harmonies of lust and appetite and ease, little pacific things, who graze the grass about their box, they praise whatever stupor gave them breath to multiply before their death— Evolution's snails, by birth, outrunning man who runs the earth. And now the frosted summer night-dew brightens, the north wind rushes through your ailing cedars, finds the gaps; thumbtacks rattle from the white maps, food's lost sight of, dinner waits, in the cold oven, icy plates— repeating and repeating, one Joan Baez on the gramophone. And here in your converted barn, we burn our hands a moment, borne by energies that never tire of piling fuel on the fire; monologue that will not hear, logic turning its deaf ear, wild spirits and old sores in league with inexhaustible fatigue. Far off that time of gentleness, when man, still licensed to increase, unfallen and unmated, heard only the uncreated Word— when God the Logos still had wit to hide his bloody hands, and sit in silence, while His peace was sung. Then the universe was young. We watch the logs fall. Fire once gone, we're done for: we escape the sun, rising and setting, a red coal, until it cinders like the soul. Great ash and sun of freedom, give us this day the warmth to live, and face the household fire. We turn our backs, and feel the whiskey burn.
Copyright © 1966 by Robert Lowell. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; March 1966; Fourth of July in Maine; Volume 217, No. 3; 66-67. |
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