Robert Lowell
Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones; Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition
Those bless'd structures, plot and rhyme why are they no help to me now I want to make
Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam. The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
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,
Gone now the baby's nurse, a lioness who ruled the roost and made the Mother cry.
What was is... since 1930; the boys in my old gang are senior partners. They start up
(I.R.A. Bombing) The British Army now carries two rifles, one with rubber rabbit-pellets for children,
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,
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston's
For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
My old flame, my wife! Remember our lists of birds? One morning last summer, I drove
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea) Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours." Schopenhauer
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
