BOOKS
277
THE EYE OF THE STORM
FOR THE UNION DEAD.
By
Robert Lowell. Ferrer, Streus
&
Giroux. $3.95.
The poet, approaching his fiftieth year, has changed his style:
there are freer rhythms, unexpectedly gentle contours, and a partial
return to imagistic reticence. This is a strange turn of events, since the
early Lowell, in curious rivalry with Hart Crane, took Eliot as a point
of departure toward a complete reversal of direction. As thoroughly ac–
cusative as Eliot's
poetry
is evasive,
Lord Weary's Castle
raised the image
to
the power of a direct, admonitory emblem. The needles of a Christmas
tree
"nail us to the wall," "Time :and the grindstone and the knife of
God"
ass:ail us by their overt and cumulative presence, and verbal
flushes learned from Hopkins obtrude: "The search-guns click and spit
and split up timber / And nick...." Lowell's newest poetry, however,
is
balanced in tone and elliptical in movement: its energy is more
hidden, its· exclamations 'almost musical.
There are difficulties in evaluating this change of style. Perhaps
the best that can be done is to balance the gain and the loss. To start
with
the loss': Lowell had recovered and mechanized an aspect of
medieval style, the "definition poem." Now some of the definiteness
is
gone. The strange and splendid harshness, the pointed shards of
images,
the aggressive apostrophes-they have given way to a new and
casual compactness. Lowell is also, perhaps, affected by a European or
"international" style which seems to have reached American poetry in
the sixties. The Hopkinsian, or over-energetic, use of language is being
abandoned for a quieter and naiver mode. Has Lowell succumbed to
this
dolce stil nuovo
in such poems as "The Lesson"?
No longer to lie reading
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
while the high mysterious squirrels
rain small gree": branches on .our sleep!
This,
surely, is "imitating," 'and to the point of parody. But Lowell's
earlier stylistic :appropriations are at least equally apparent in these new
poems,
and with ominous rather than whimsical overtones, as in "Beyond
the Alps" (from
Life Studies
and expanded here) where a classical
dawn
comes with unclassical violence:
the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth
lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels
on terra firma through the morning's thigh.
