76
PARTISAN REVIEW
nothing here like the tosspot
Christ for Sale,
but the whole uncontrolled
ferocity of poems like it has disappeared. The best new poems, in so far
as they reflect the same interests, develop less from that tone than from
the trumpet and the sigh simultaneous in the extraordinary distich
quoted in PARTISAN REVIEW by Mr. Jarrell:
When the ruined farmer knocked out Abel's brains,
Our Father laid great cities on his soul.
...
I give the lines again because, though the poem they began has been
discerningly scrapped, they announce a major theme. Such a writer's
symbols are worth examination. I propose that we take seriously both
the .title and the illustration on the title page, of Cain's second crime
(the murder and flight), and. see what they come to. The precise cause
of Cain's ruin has been lost, but the cause of Lord Weary's-the title
comes from the ballad of
Lamkin-is
known: when his castle was finished
he refused payment to his mason Lamkin and sailed away, whereupon
Lamkin, helped by the false nurse, broke into the castle and destroyed
his wife and babe. Lord Weary's castle is a house of ingratitude, failure
of obligation, crime and punishment. Possibly Cain did not bring
enough
of his first-fruits, or brought them grudgingly; "I canna pay you, Lamkin,
I
Unless I sell my land," which he will not do. Later as the stabbed
babe cries in death, Lamkin calls up to its mother, "He winna still, lady,
I
For a' his father's land"; and the wandering blood of Cain cannot
repent. Besides frequent references to Cain, the stories may be delib–
erately juxtaposed in a sonnet based on Rilke's
Lezster Abend
("Wearily
by the broken altar, Abel" etc.; though
wearily
is taken from Macintyre's
translation, which other details of the poem repeat, it must have been
retained for a reason). But of course the myths are suggestive not sym–
metrical. Thus Cain's guilt rings through the war poems; the nurse is
Eve who, letting in the Devil, brought vengeance on Adam; but Lamkin,
sometimes the Serpent who murdered innocence' (at the ballad's end
he and the nurse are executed), mainly is the Lord who enters
with
sharp
sword the faithless house He built.
Therefore most of the thematic poems occur in Hell or ante-hell,
the world "that spreads in pain," the rich house we use without paying
for; which the defrauded One will enter suddenly. Already with the
Capitalist of an early poem, here revised into
Christmas Eve Under Hook–
er's Statue,
Mr. Lowell had begun to imagine characters moving about in
it, but for the most part in the first book he simply abuse.d it. By a shift
toward the dramatic which is one of the large features of his develop–
ment, he is now peopling it. (It is to be noted that Lowell is an
objective
poet; except as a Christian or a descendant he scarcely appears in his
poems.) The most elaborate example is a dramatic sequence
Between
