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and bloody Heaven. (He has succeeded in making salvation seem as real,
and almost as frightening, as damnation.) In these poems the blood of
the martyrs is the creed of the Church; his Christ (named as one names
Madonnas) is the Christ of the Tabloids. When over this coiling dark–
ness there is a grave, indistinct and serene lightening of pity, one is more
than usually moved. His world, his. rhetoric and his beliefs are joined in
an iron unity of temperament; in a day when poets aspire to be irresist–
ible forces, he is an immovable object.
Of New England he has the grim affectionate knowledge one has
of one's damned kin. Here are the
fearful Witnesses
who
fenced their
gardens with the Redman's bones;
the clippers and the slavers, the sea–
man knitting at the asylum; the Public Gardens
where
/
The bread–
stuffed ducks are brooding, where with tub
/
And strainer the mid–
Sunday Irish scare/The sun-struck shallows for the dusky chub,·
and here
is
the faith/ That made the Pilgrim Makers take a lathe/ To point their
wooden steeples lest the Word be dumb.
(These parodies of quotations,
or slurred references to them, are sometimes a wonderful source of wit
and depth, sometimes a senseless habit:
all manmarks fwm this world
man never made.)
Here his harshest propositions flower out of facts. But
his satires of present-day politics and its continuation often have a severe
crudity that suggests Michael Wigglesworth rewriting the
H oratian Ode;
airplanes he treats as Tate does, only more so-he gives the impression
of having encountered them in Mother Shipton. Several of his poems. are
harsh and arbitrary (though surprisingly realized and surprisingly felt)
exercises "in the manner of' the seventeenth century. But most of these
excesses seem temporary; what is permanently excessive is an obstinacy
of temperament extreme enough to seem a form of violence.
Mr. Lowell's Christianity has nothing to do with the familiar litera–
ry-not to say economic-Christianity of
as
if,
the belief in the necessity
of belief: all that !inks
Time,
Auden, Werfel and the Caudillo in one
believing band. He
is
a Christian, and consequently knows that Chris–
tianity is true, just as physicists used to know that physics is true. Among
the usual rout of Catholic converts he looks like another John the Bap–
tist, all zeal and hair; one would have said,
a priori,
that he is the ideal
follower of Karl Barth. A few years ago he would have supported
neither Franco nor the Loyalists; one sees him sending a couple of clip–
pers full of converted minute-men to wipe out the whole bunch-human,
and hence deserving. (I wish Mr. Lowell could cast a colder eye on
minute-men. His treatment of the American revolution is in the great
tradition of Marx, Engels and Parson Weems.) When the Roman Em–
pire (in his
Dea Roma)
evolves into the Roman Catholic Church, there
is
a change in degree, but not in kind; in his poems the Church
is,
among other things, an overwhelming social-historical
fact,
a State as
frightening as any secular one. (His imagery for it is always Bismarck–
ian.) His religious poems are not the familiar bad new sort, but the
