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downhill"; "0 that the spirit could remain / tinged but untarnished by
its strain!") . Morning puzzles - what one sees through a glass of water -
suggest metaphysical ones ("Each day, He shines through darker glass. /
In this small town where everything / is known, I see his vanishing
emblems . . ."). Behind the mocking tone of these last lines - omni–
science reduced to the gossip of a New England town - he gathers the
growing frustrations of the poem. Business as usual, the faithful at
church, empty patriotism ("His white spire and flagpole") - these
Sunday sights represent useless mysteries, mused over and rejected. He is
provoked into a bitter gaiety, light counter to the dark moods of the
poem:
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!
I dwell on the angular give-and-take of the poem because finally
that is its subject: rousing the self to face the day and everything that
entails.
If
this poem has something to say about privacy and public
horrors, it is in showing the inner resources by which we deal with
them: frail thoughtfulness; bitter, fanciful mockery; and finally the pity
mustered at the end for "all joy gone / from this sweet volcanic cone."
At least two of the other poems in this series are placed at the same
crossroads of public and private:
Fourth of July in Maine
and
Central
Park.
The latter, revised since its periodical publication, has lost a cache
of personal detail which counterpointed and framed the powerful, violent
scenes in the park; and, though this may not be a fair way to judge it,
I miss the perspective of the earlier version. More than that, both of
these poems lack the remarkable movement of "Waking Early Sunday
Morning," its shifts of mood and energetic questioning.
Translations and imitations make up more than half of this book.
From Horace, Juvenal, Dante, G6ngora and Quevedo, the poems are,
in Lowell's own words, largely about "Rome, the greatness and horror
of her empire." Many of them, especially Juvenal's poem that has come
to be called "The Vanity of Human Wishes," are important complements
to the American poems in this volume, almost as
if
Lowell were trying
other voices, other adjustments of the intimate and oratorical. It is
curious to have the Juvenal satire given to us - new - in English,
after it has been familiar so long in Dr. Johnson's grand philosophical
