lOOKS
279
a methodical
hastening of the end.
In the poetry that precedes
Life
Studies,
darkness calls to darkness: Nature appears as a world of portents
rising against the dominion of man, and the poet harshly welcomes the
suggested reversal. His visionary method is a kind of
temporicide,
and
his
poetical method sets spiritual symbol against daily event. He is
not a reconciling poet. The very grinding together of natural experience
and supernatural emblem is part of a harshness directed against tem–
porality.
But in
Life Studies,
and even more so in the present volume, Lowell
resists methodical darkness. He is like Faustus at midnight who cries,
"Lente,
lente currite noctis equi."
There is a first retreat from darkness,
and into life, when poetry becomes more confession:al-a sharp-eyed
census of the unreconcilable elements in life. The retreat, however, is
very
imperfect. For realism easily becomes expressionism, while Lowell's
indicative mood tends to indite rather than describe. "The man is killing
time," he writes in "The Drinker." Or, in the title poem of
For The
Union
Dead,
which turns on several apocalyptic emblems: "The ditch
is
nearer." This nearing, this investing of experience with doom, this
dark gloating even, this aggressive parody of at-one-ment in the
grim
images and the massing of the very words ("The Duce's lynched, bare,
booted skull still spoke") is the temptation as well as energy of his
vision.
It is, however, the special distinction of
For The Union Dead
to
Jelreat even further from darkness by taking this retreat for subject.
Here
poetry itself, by virtue of its style-that subtler style-holds back
the
darkening mind. A presumption of restraint is felt at every level.
wwell is more successful in avoiding the intrusive literary or apocalyptic
symbol, though whales still rear their blubber and spiders march. A poem
like "The Drinker," with its discreet, almost neutral ending, is utterly
different from "The Drunken Fisherman"
(fJord Weary's Castle)
which
outsped even Donne's imagination of ruin. The new portrait of "Jonathan
Edwards" is unusually urbane in tone and meandering. Natural experience
and supernatural emblem may even blend, as when Exodus 12 quietly
supports the "red ear of Indian maize . . . splashed on the door" in "The
Old Flame," a poem dealing with the old passing into the new. That
well should admit newness is itself new, though an ironic image of
"the plow
j
groaning up hill-j a red light, then a blue ..." flickers
in memory and disturbs the idea of a definitive progress. "Water,"
another memory study, shows him in the very act of restraining a
darkening yet consolatory movement of the mind:
