694
PARTISAN REVIEW
poem which anybody will want to read. The organization and whole
conception of "David and Bathsheba
in
the Public Garden" are so
mannered and idiosyncratic, so peculiar to Mr. Lowell, that the poem
is spoiled, in spite of parts as beautiful as that about the harvest moon.
Someone is sure to say about this poem that you can't tell David from
Bathsheba without a program: they both (like the majority of Mr.
Lowell's characters) talk just like Mr. Lowell.
I cannot think of any objection at all to "Mother Marie Therese"
and "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid," and if I could I would be too
overawed to make it. "Mother Marie Therese" is the best poem Mr.
Lowell has ever written, and "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" is al–
most as good;
very
few living poets have written poems that surpass
these. "Mother Marie Therese" is the most human and tender, the least
specialized, of all Mr. Lowell's poems; it is warped neither by Doctrine
nor by that doctrine which each of us becomes for himself;
in
it, for
once, Mr. Lowell really gets out of himself. Sometimes the New Bruns–
wick nun who is talking does sound like a not-too-distant connection of
the Lowells, but generally she seems as much herself as porpoise-bellied
Father Turbot, "his bald spot tapestried by colored glass," sounds like
himself when he squeaks: "N-n-nothing is so d-dead/ As a dead
S-s-sister." Certainly Father Turbot
is
real; the drowned Mother
Superior ("reading Rabelais from her chaise,! Or parroting the
Ac–
tion Franfaise";
she who "half-renounced by Candle, Book, and Bell,/
Her flowers and fowling-pieces for the church"; she who saw that
our world is passing; but "whose trust/ Was in its princes") is real; but
the sixty-year-old nun who speaks the poem in grief for her is most
real of all. One can judge something of
her
reality and of the quality of
the poem simply by looking at the long passage with which the poem
ends:
The bell-buoy, whom she called the Cardinal,
Dances upon her. If she hears at all,
She only hears it tolling to this shore,
Where our frost-bitten sisters know the roar
Of water, inching, always on the move
For virgins, when they wish the times were love,
And their hysterical hosannahs rouse
The loveless harems of the buck ruffed grouse
Who drums, untroubled now, beside the sea–
As if he found our stern virginity
Contra naturam.
We are ruinous;
God's Providence th1·ough time has mastered us:
