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the Porch and the Altar,
at the end of which, with astonishing style, he
damns the mother-fixed adulterous drunken protagonist,
the Day
Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay,
Dies amara valde:-
Here the Lord
Is Lucifer in harness: hand on sword,
He watches me for Mother, and will turn
The bier and baby-carriage where I burn.
The Lord has often this aspect in these poems.
If
reproached with it, the
poet might reply in the words of the Katherine of this poem. "The winter
sun is pleasant, and it warms / My heart with love for others, but the
swarms/Of penitents have dwindled"; or say that he had taken John Da–
vidson's impressive advice, "Enlarge your Hell; preserve it in repair ;/Only
a splendid Hell keeps Heaven fair." Still one wonders whether he would
have allowed the piercing, nonformulary salvation imagined by the
Balzac of
Christ in Flanders,
and one is surprised that, with two poems
based on writings by the prodigious Edwards, he passed over
Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God.
But the poems are rich with nonformulary life, and Mr. Lowell
has other religious tones also.
John, Matthew, Luke and Mark,
Gospel me to the Garden, let me come
Where Mary twists the warlock with her flo wers–
Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers
And her whole body an ecstatic womb
As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom.
He is weakest on the whole when near a substance-model, he seems to
rely on the model as well as on himself, and his evergreen ingenuity gets
too free play; yet even the poems with immediate sources show, together
with their defects, qualities thoroughly rare and valuable. (About a
• third ·of the new poems have direct literary or historical sources, trans–
formed under his imagination.) His
Ghost,
based on a beautiful elegy of
Propertius (iv. 7) not touched by Pound, is not by some distance as
fresh delicate firm as Pound's
Homage
but it will stand the comparison
without looking idiotic-a sufficient compliment. Lowell is as individual;
less energetic with more appearance of energy (that is, higher keyed–
beat,
to take an amusing detail, rendering equally
effugit
and
pelle);
more original in the respect that he is indifferent where Propertius is
magnificent, best where nothing remarkable is happening in the Latin
or he is inventing; more faithful, only transposing lines 49 ff. and 7'3 ff.;
less flexible; much less witty; as capable as Pound of a dense memorable
