Man And Wife

Robert Lowell 1917 (Boston) – 1977 (New York City)



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,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad,
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye,
and dragged me home alive.... Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
out drank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet,
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
  
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade,
loving, rapid, merciless,
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
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Submitted on August 03, 2020

Modified on May 02, 2023

53 sec read
135

Quick analysis:

Scheme AAXXBCCXDDEBFEGHBBEGFH XXXXXA
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 974
Words 176
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 22, 6

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence "Cal" Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. Lowell stated, "The poets who most directly influenced me ... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination!..... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art." Lowell was capable of writing both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; some of his verse, in some poems from Life Studies and Notebook, fell somewhere in between metered and free verse. After the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles," he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement. more…

All Robert Lowell poems | Robert Lowell Books

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