THREE POETS
Now all the bells are tongueless, now we freeze,
A later advent, pruner of warped trees,
Whistles about our nunnery slabs, and yells,
And water oozes from us into wells;
A new year swells and stirs. Our narrow Bay
Freezes itself and us. We cannot say
Christ even sees us, when the ice floes toss
His statue, made by Hurons, on the cross
That Father Turbot sank on Mother's mound–
A whirligig! Mother, we must give ground,
Little by little; but it does no good.
Tonight, while I am piling on more driftwood,
And stooping with the poker, you are here,
Telling your beads; and breathing in my ear,
You watch your orphan swording at her fears.
I feel you twitch my shoulder. No one hears
Us mock the sisters, as we used to, years
And years behind us, when we heard the spheres
Whirring
venite;
and we held our ears.
My mother's hollow sockets fill with tears.
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"Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" is as good-and as thoroughly
and surprisingly organized-a poem about power and the self as any
I can recall. Its subject matter and peculiar circumstances justify the
harshness and violence, the barbarous immediacy, that often seem
arbitrary in Mr. Lowell's poems; and these are set off by passages as
tender and beautiful as this description of the dead Pallas:
Face of snow,
You are the flower that country girls have caught,
A wild bee-pillaged honey-suckle brought
To the returning bridegroom-the design
Has not yet left it, and the petals shine;
The earth, its mother, has, at last, no help:
It is itself.
I have rarely had more of a sense of the terrible continuity of the
world (and of the ego that learns neither from itself nor from the world
what the dead face is made to tell Aeneas: "Brother,
try,!
0 child
of Aphrodite, try to die:/ To die is life") than wh!!n I read the con–
clusion into which all the terms of the poem coalesce:
Church is over, and its bell
Frightens the yeliowhammers, as I wake
And watch the whitecaps wrinkle up the lake.
