278
GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
This is the Lowell one knows best, who associates birth with labor
and violence. Things "bleed with dawn." And because this
Lowell
remains so essential in
For The Union Dead,
it is hard to consider the
muted style as
very
significant.
If
Lowell's
poetry
moves more
halting~
between sentiments and stanzas, his images continue to be entries in a
doomsday book: they come nearer and nearer to us, threatening our
detachment, massing with prophetic intensity. Is the intermingling, then,
of a subtler style, purely experimental, purely a technique? "Each drug
that numbs," he says
in
"Soft Wood," "alerts another nerve to pain."
Perhaps it is a spice or drug of this kind.
I would argue that the style of
For The Union Dead
reveals a
genuine spiritual change, a revision of thought on the deepest and most
internal level. Let us begin with what remains constant in Lowell. The
major concern of this book is, as ever, pain: pain and anguish at
temporality. That "chilling sensation of here and now, of exact con–
temporaneity" which Elizabeth Bishop had praised is strongly present.
Lowell's attitude toward time is paradoxical: time is the accuser, yet
time is inauthentic. Time eyes us through objects that loom large, or
through "unforgivable" landscapes, yet everything converges to no effect,
like waves breaking harmlessly and sight blurring. Time, and also
memory, are the "back-track of the screw"; yet their pressure-the
pressure essentially of religious expectation-is unremitting. "Even new
life is fuel," Lowell says ironically.
No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish bT'own buffalo hair
on its shanks, one ascetic talon
clasping the imperial sky.
It
says:
an eye for an eye
a tooth for a tooth.
The
le.x talionis
here referred to is an imperative laid by con–
sciousness on itself, and requires us to be perpetually on guard, open to
every
sight. Our verdict on temporal matters should be that they are
"true and insignificant" ("Hawthorne" ). Instead, because of an Ameri–
can or Puritan tension between trivia and magnalia, life becomes a
restless search for evidence, a satanic "going to and fro" in the earth.
If
time is inauthentic, can a poet do more than record or "accuse"
this to-and-fro? What genuine visionariness is possible? The question
has a bearing on Lowell's development and on his present change of
style. His earliest poetry strives for vision, but there is no vision except
