Robert Lowell Quotes
Robert Lowell delivers vivid, sometimes wild verses on poetry, nature and loss that feel like a restless, midnight wander.
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A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket-- The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand.
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Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean.
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Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.
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It's the light of the oncoming train.
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It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
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Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
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I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.
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In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.
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If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.
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The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
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What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.
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Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.
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This is death To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.
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In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.