We’re enjoying having a kitten in the house. Leonardo really had it right. A cat is an absolute masterpiece of
creation. The movements and balance and strength are sheer artistry. We’ve had Tiger now almost two
and a half weeks. Here are some
pictures.
He certainly likes tight little spaces to cuddle into.
A box turned sideways (above)…and a little cave
(below).
He likes to play with Matthew’s toys. They share the same room.
And I thought it humorous to have a Tiger attack a
lion.
Last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday and I did want to honor it in some way. How about this lovely version of the Thirteenth Century hymn, Veni Sancte Spiritus, performed by Sequentia.
The Latin lyrics are provided in the clip, so here is the English translation.
COME, Thou holy Paraclete, and from thy celestial seat send thy light and brilliancy: Father of the poor, draw near; giver of all gifts, be here; come, the soul's true radiancy.
Come, of comforters the best, of the soul the sweetest guest, come in toil refreshingly. Thou in labor rest most sweet, thou art shadow from the heat, comfort in adversity.
O thou Light, most pure and blest, shine within the inmost breast of thy faithful company. Where thou art not, man hath nought; every holy deed and thought comes from thy Divinity.
What is soilèd, makes thou pure; what is wounded, work its cure; what is parcèd, fructify. What is rigid, gently bend; what is frozen, warmly tend; strengthen what goes erringly.
Fill thy faithful who confide in thy power to guard and guide, with thy sevenfold mystery. Here thy grace and virtue send; grant salvation in the end, and in heaven felicity. Amen. Alleluia.
Here’s
another poem by this year’s poetic focus, Robert Lowell, and I wanted to post
this poem in this month of May since May is Mary’s month, and this poem at its
core has a prayer to the Blessed Mother.
The poem was published in 1946, and I would guess it was written toward
the latter part of World War II. I
mentioned in my introductory post on Robert Lowell that he was a conscientious
objector to the war, and a strong anti-war proponent after the war.
The Dead in Europe
By Robert Lowell
After the planes
unloaded, we fell down
Buried together,
unmarried men and women;
Not crown of thorns, not
iron, not Lombard crown,
Not grilled and spindle
spires pointing to heaven
Could save us. Raise us,
Mother, we fell down
Here hugger-mugger in the
jellied fire:
Our sacred earth in our
day was our curse.
Our Mother, shall we rise
on Mary’s day
In Maryland, wherever
corpses married
Under the rubble, bundled
together? Pray
For us whom the
blockbusters marred and buried;
When Satan scatters us on
Rising-day,
O Mother, snatch out
bodies from the fire:
Our sacred earth in our
day was our curse.
Mother, my bones are
trembling and I hear
The earth’s
reverberations and the trumpet
Bleating into my
shambles. Shall I bear,
(O Mary!) unmarried man
and powder-puppet,
Witness to the Devil?
Mary, hear,
O Mary, marry earth, sea,
air and fire;
Our sacred earth in our
day is our curse.
Let
me provide a short analysis because this poem illustrates why Lowell is such a fine
poet, and as I said before the finest American poet in the post WWII era. This is not a poem in Lowell’s confessional
style, and yet it has a conversational tone that belies its highly stylized
form. There are three stanzas of seven
lines each written in iambic pentameter.
The first five lines have a rhyme scheme of ABABA and the sixth and
seventh lines ending with the same word in each stanza: “fire” in the sixth and
“curse” in the seventh. Actually the
seventh line is repeated in each stanza as a hymnal chorus, carrying enormous
power: “Our sacred earth in our day is our curse.” The poem uses two conceits which expounds its
theme, the image of being buried as a result of the bombs, and the metaphor of
marriage to suggest a harmonious resolution.
Let me try to flesh that out. The
bombs burry “the unmarried men and women,” not unmarried to each other but unmarried
to a broken, dissonant world. Each
stanza appeals to the Blessed Mother to resolve this fragmentation and marry humanity
to the four elements that was in classical times supposed to compose the
material world, earth, water, air, and fire. The war of his day is a curse stemming from
the fall from Eden. Marriage is not a literal
sacramental marriage but a metaphoric bringing to unity. Excellent poem.
We
may not be in a world war but the times today are pretty bad and worthy of such
prayer. Blessed Mother pray for this
broken world.
I
know, it’s Tuesday, but this is from yesterday on our trip to Fleet Week Naval
ship on Memorial Day. Fleet Week is an event that comes to New York City every year where Navy, Marines, and
Coast Guardsmen put on displays for the City the week prior to Memorial Day and
concluding on Memorial Day. Usually a
major Naval sea vessel docks at one of the ports and allows the public to come
aboard. This year the naval vessel was the
USS San Antonio, an amphibious landing craft which brings Marines or Naval Seals into a disputed
situation. So it carries both Sailors
and Marines.
It
was difficult to choose from all the pictures we took which to post, but here’s
a bunch.
Standing
in front of an artillery cannon with a couple of Marines.
Matthew
holding an M16. He just loved holding
the guns.
On
deck was an Osprey air craft, which is sort of a hybrid helicopter/air
plane. I think Matthew is with the piolt here.
Sitting
inside a landing craft vehicle.
Posing
with a sailor and then Commanding Officers.
And
finally there was a chin up bar which a couple of sailors challenged the guests
to see how many they could do. Matthew
was able to snap Daddy giving it a try.
For
the record, I did four. I told the sailor
I could probably only do two (I low balled it to reduce expectations) but if I
really was going to give it my all I could probably have squeezed out a couple
of more, which I guess is OK for my age.
But the teenage girl before me did ten, which impressed everyone, and
the sailor after me did twelve, but that was 82 for that morning.
Finally
this video explains everything we saw on board.
Just
too cool. One of the things I taught Matthew is to tell each service man or woman thank you for their service. Even Matthew said afterward we thank them because they protect us. Happy Memorial Day. Honor a solider, sailor, marine, coast guardsman,
or any of the other military, especially one who has made the ultimate sacrifice.
I love the face and the wavy hair that is both mirrored in the two subjects. I love Mary's dress, and the general direction of the movement looking down, which I supposed implies a looking down toward humanity. I wonder at the transparency of the shirt on the Child Jesus. Does it suggest His dual nature of man and God? If so, then does the darkly opaque dress on the Blessed Mother, which is in complete contrast, suggest her humanity? Good questions. Lovely painting.
If you want to know why May is Mary's month, read Kimberly Cook's blog at CatholicMom.
I
found this to be an interesting story.
Two sisters who had been given up for adoption as infants and had never
met happen to be in the same writing class in college. From the NY Times:
Lizzie Valverde and Katy
Olson were strangers when they enrolled at Columbia University a few years ago.
Ms. Valverde is from New Jersey, while Ms. Olson had grown up mostly in Florida
and Iowa.
Their lives crossed in January
2013, on the first day of a writing class, when they took part in one of those
familiar around-the-table introductions that by the end had led them to a
stunning realization.
These strangers were
sisters.
The two women had come to
Columbia to learn the finer points of storytelling and wound up in the middle
of a doozy: an intertwined tale of their own that they say they could never
have conjured.
Their shared story line —
a chance reunion three decades after being born to the same troubled mother in
Florida and then raised by adoptive families in different parts of the country
— has been knitted together by years of curiosity on both women’s parts about
their origins.
And when Ms. Valverde,
35, graduates on Monday with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the
university’s School of General Studies, Ms. Olson, 34, who graduated last year
with a degree in creative writing and is now pursuing a master’s degree in the
same subject at Columbia, will be there to congratulate her.
It’s
rather coincidental that both sisters landed at the same university, but both
taking up writing? That seemed more than
coincidental.
Once [in class], they sat
across from each other in a classroom in Kent Hall, where the instructor asked
the students go around the table and introduce themselves.
Ms. Valverde, who had
registered for the class just minutes before it began, introduced herself and
told the class, among other things, that she had been adopted as a child and
was raising a young daughter of her own. She also disclosed what she described
as her goofy obsession with the Olsen twins.
Ms. Olson was stupefied.
“It looked like she was
having a panic attack,” Ms. Valverde said.
Ms. Valverde’s personal
information matched closely what Ms. Olson had recently discovered about her
own adoption and biological family. She realized that the classmate across the
table could be her biological sister.
And
later we learn
from an early age, both
were relentlessly curious, driven and passionate about writing, though they
both also dropped out of high school and did not follow the conventional
college-to-career path.
OK,
now that’s the human level of the story, and you can go to the article to read
more of it, but what was further interesting was that their birth mother,
Leslie Parker, had herself always wanted to be a writer.
In an interview on
Thursday, Ms. Parker called the reconnection to her daughters an answer to 30
years of prayers, adding, “I felt like the world was coming full-circle.” In
the years since putting the girls up for adoption, Ms. Parker raised three sons
while continuing to struggle through a meager existence.
She said she always
wanted to be writer, but a hard-knock life riddled with poverty, drug abuse and
emotional problems had been too much to overcome.
As a teenager, she let
the girls go because, she said, “I was not in a position to raise them,”
adding, “If I had raised them, they wouldn’t have had the privileges they had,”
as adopted children.
“They’re brilliant,
beautiful young women,” Ms. Parker said. “In them, I see what I had the
potential to be. They’re both living what I always wanted to be.”
So
here’s the question. Is the desire to
write, especially write creatively, a genetic attribute? I don’t know, but what an unusual story, and
I would be willing to bet the two sisters will one day collaborate on a book
about it all.
One
last thing, and as a side note, what a wonderful thing Leslie Parker did in not
aborting the two girls. You constantly
hear how it would be better for the unborn child not to be born given certain circumstances. How?
And why when so many people want to adopt. Here’s a final quote from Leslie Parker.
“I’m glad I chose to have
them and gave them the chance at life,” she said. “I’m not religious, I’m
spiritual, but if you don’t believe in a higher power, you would, when you
heard their story.”
Of
course this was completely unplanned.
Thursday, May 14th (I date it for posterity’s sake) after
dinner at about half past six Matthew and I stepped out for Matthew to bike
ride to the local school yard. It’s just
a couple of blocks away and they have a little track on level ground for him to
circle. We turned to go into the
backyard and right there on the side of the house was a local stray cat, who
was caught by surprise. Seeing the two
of us, she darted up the block. But
nearby, frozen with surprise was a little kitten. It didn’t know what to do, and when we
approached it he sped in a different direction than the big cat, into our back
yard, where he hid behind one of the garbage cans.
We
chased him and I reached behind and pulled him out. It was the cutest little thing. I didn’t know if I should leave him out, and
yet taking him in would be a burden. We
had never had cats before. We already
have a demanding dog, who is still an overactive pup. We already have a five year old boy who
consumes all our time when he’s not in school or asleep. I could have put him down and let his
mother—if that was his mother who darted off, though I some doubt because the
coloring was completely different, and she, if it were a she, showed no
motherly concern for the tike. But he
was so darned cute. And I don’t know how
many kittens survive into cathood living in the streets. He was so passive in my hands. He wasn’t afraid.
I
called my wife over. If she said no,
that would have been the end of that.
She too warmed to him. She gave
me a bunch of questions—legitimate questions on the difficulties. She had suspected she was even allergic to
cats. I just shrugged. She didn’t say no. He had the prettiest face I had ever seen on
a kitten. Matthew insisted we keep
him. So we brought him in.
We
didn’t know how to care for a kitten. We
couldn’t even tell if he was male or female.
My wife emailed a few of her friends who have cats and they recommended
replacement milk. We weren’t sure how
young he was. I went on the internet and
found something that you could gage an age.
I estimated four weeks. That was
too young to be taken from his mom, so we rushed out to get the replacement
milk. We set up a crate from when Rosie
was a small pup for him. He drank the
milk. He wasn’t scared and he just
relaxed in your arms.
We
got in to the Vet the very next day. By
then I had found a better gage to estimate his age, which I figured now to be
five weeks. The Vet agreed. He was healthy, though he’s had diarrhea. We learned about kitty litter and feline
bathroom habits. He quickly took to a
litter box. He’s so darned cute covering
his movements, and pawing the granules. The
Vet said he was male. My wife wanted to
name him Thor, which I hated, and I wanted to name him Simba, which my wife
hated. Matthew named him Tiger, and it
has stuck.
When
we went to fill out the Vet ID form, it asked for a breed. We had no clue, so we asked the woman at the
desk. “Domestic Shorthair,” she said
with authority. Then it asked for color,
and he has several colors. “What color
would you say he is?” I asked. I held
him up, she squinted. “Grey Tabby.” So there’s all the pertinent information.
OK,
here are some pictures. He’s being kept
in Matthew’s room for now.
So
far Matthew and Tiger are getting along great, even though Matthew handles him
a little roughly.Here they are watching
a movie on the video player.
And
I think my wife to her surprise has taken to Tiger the most.
And
now I have someone in the house who has as grey a head of hair as I do.
Now
when they find a stray grey hair on the ground, they can’t say it’s from me.
I
just love the way Eudora Welty writes.
There is a delicateness and sensitivity to it that is hard to pin
down. I recently read her short story,
“The Key,” and while it’s not worth writing up an analysis, I did want to
highlight her writing. It’s a simple
story; it’s not going to win any awards.
But one of the objectives of a short story—objectives as I see them—is
to capture the story of our lives, and I think this story does that. It’s the story of a husband and wife, Albert
and Ellie Morgan, both deaf mutes, waiting at a train station for a trip up to
Niagara Falls. When they talk, they talk
in sign language of the deaf. They have
saved for a long time to make this trip, a trip that Ellie has waited for a
good deal of her adult life. Albert had
been told that a deaf person could hear the falls when you stand by it, and so it
had been the desire of their lives to experience it. While waiting for the train a red-haired
young man drops a key that Albert picks up and becomes the topic of
conversation between husband and wife.
That conversation makes them miss the train.
I’ll
present two sections for appreciation.
First from the opening of the story to the first segmented break.
It was quiet in the
waiting room of the remote little station, except for the night sounds of
insects. You could hear the embroiling
movements of the weeds outside, which somehow gave the effect of some tenuous
voice in the night, telling a story. Or
you could listen to the fat thudding of the light bugs and the hoarse rushing
of their big wings against the wooden ceiling.
Some of the bugs were clinging heavily to the yellow globe, like idiot
bugs to a senseless smell.
Under this prickly light
two rows of people sat in silence, their faces stung, their bodies twisted and
quietly uncomfortable, expectantly so, in ones and twos, not quite asleep. No one seemed impatient, although the train
was late. A little girl lay flung back
on her mother’s lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
Ellie and Albert Morgan
were sitting on a bench like the others waiting for the train and had nothing
to say to each other. Their names were
ever so neatly and rather largely printed on a big reddish-tan suitcase
strapped crookedly shut, because of a missing buckle, so that it hung apart
finally like a stupid pair of lips. “Albert
Morgan, Ellie Morgan, Yellow Leaf, Mississippi.” They must have been driven into town in a
wagon, for they and the suitcase were all touched here and there with a fine
yellow dust, like finger marks.
Ellie Morgan was a large
woman with a face as pink and crowded as an old fashion rose. She must have been about forty years
old. One of those black satchel purses
hung over her straight, strong wrist. It
must have been her savings which were making possible this trip. And to what place? you wondered, for she sat
there as tense and solid as a cube, as if to endure some nameless apprehension
rising and overflowing within her at the thought of travel. Her face worked ad broke into strained,
hardening lines, as if there had been a death—that too-explicit evidence of
agony in the desire to communicate.
Albert made a slower and
softer impression. He sat motionless
beside Ellie, holding his hand in his lap with both hands—a hat you were sure
he had never worn. He looked home-made,
as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband
when she sat alone at night. He had a
shock of very fine sunburned yellow hair.
He was too shy for this world, you could see. His hands were like cardboard, he held his
hat so still; and yet how softly his eyes fell upon its crown, moving dreamily
and yet with dread over its brown surface.
He was smaller than his wife. His
suit was brown, too, and he wore it neatly and carefully, as though he were
murmuring, “Don’t look—no need to look—I am effaced.” But you have seen that expression too in
silent children, who will tell you what they dreamed the night before in
sudden, almost hilarious, bursts of confidence.
Every now and then, as
though he perceived some minute thing, a sudden alert, tantalized look would
creep over the little man’s face, and he would gaze slowly around him, quite
slyly. Then he would bow his head again;
the expression would vanish; some inner refreshment had been denied him. Behind his head was a wall poster, dirty with
time, showing an old fashion locomotive about to crash into an open touring car
filled with women in veils. No one in
the station was frightened by the familiar poster, any more than they were
aroused by the little man whose rising and drooping head it framed. Yet for a moment he might seem to you to be
sitting there quite filled with hope.
Among the others in the
station was a strong-looking young man, alone, hatless, red haired, who was
standing by the wall while the rest sat on benches. He had a small key in his hand and was
turning it over and over in his fingers, nervously passing it from one hand to
the other, tossing it gently into the air and catching it again.
He stood and stared in
distraction at the other people; so intent and so wide was his gaze that anyone
who glanced after him seemed rocked like a small boat in the wake of a large
one. There was an excess of energy about
him that separated him from everyone else, but in the motion of his hands there
was, instead of the craving for communication, something of reticence, even of
secrecy, as the key rose and fell. You
guessed that he was a stranger in town; he might have been a criminal or a
gambler, but his eyes were widened with gentleness. His look, which traveled without stopping for
long anywhere, was a hurried focusing of a very tender and explicit regard.
The color of his hair
seemed to jump and move, like the flicker of a match struck in the wind. The ceiling lights were not steady but seemed
to pulsate like a living transient force, and made the young man in his
preoccupation appear to tremble in the midst of his size and strength, and to
fail to impress his exact outline upon the yellow walls. He was like a salamander in the fire. “Take care,” you wanted to say to him, and
yet also, “Come here.” Nervously, and
quite apart in his distraction, he continued to stand tossing the key back and
forth from one hand to the other.
Suddenly it became a gesture of abandonment: one hand stayed passive in
the air, then seized too late: the key fell to the floor.
All
those beautiful similes make that scene so vivid, And then there is this touching scene.
And Albert, with his face
so capable of amazement, made you suspect the funny thing about talking to
Ellie. Until you do, declared his round
brown eyes, you can be peaceful and content that everything takes care of itself. As long as you can let it alone everything
goes peaceful, like an uneventful day at the farm—chores attended to, women
working in the house, you in the field, crop growing as well as can be
expected, the cow giving, and the sky like a coverlet over it all—so that
you’re as full of yourself as a colt, in need of nothing, and nothing needing
you. But when you pick up your hands and
start to talk, if you don’t watch carefully, this security will run away and
leave you. You say something, make an
observation, just to answer your wife’s worryings, and everything is jolted,
disturbed, laid open like a ground behind a plow, with you running along after
it.
But happiness, Albert
knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing
which you reach for and pick and hide in your breast, a shiny thing that
reminds you of something alive and leaping.
Ellie sat there quiet as
a mouse. She had unclasped her purse and
taken out a little card with a picture of Niagara Falls.
“Do you see the little
rail?” Albert began in tenderness. And
Ellie loved to watch him tell her about it; she clasped her hands and began to
smile and show her crooked tooth; she looked young; it was the way she had
looked as a child.
“That is what the teacher
pointed to with her wand on the magic lantern slide—the little rail. You stand right here. You lean up hard against the rail. Then you can hear Niagara Falls.”
“How do you hear it?”
begged Ellie, nodding.
“You hear it with your
whole self. You listen with your arms
and your legs and your whole body.
You’ll never forget what hearing is, after that.”
He must have told her
hundreds of times in his obedience, yet she smile with gratitude, and stared
deep, deep into the tinted picture of the waterfall.
It’s
lovely the way Welty goes in and out of character’s minds and just happens on a
particular thought in that mind to reach a core part of that person, like in this
sentence from Albert’s mind which I’ll repeat to highlight from above: “As long
as you can let it alone everything goes peaceful, like an uneventful day at the
farm—chores attended to, women working in the house, you in the field, crop
growing as well as can be expected, the cow giving, and the sky like a coverlet
over it all—so that you’re as full of yourself as a colt, in need of nothing,
and nothing needing you.”
There
is an actual dramatization of “The Key” into a short film, “performed
exclusively in American Sign Language and created by a collaborative team of
deaf and hearing artists.” I would love to see it, but I guess it would need subtitles since I don’t know
sign language. I could not find it on YouTube,
but I did find this clip of Welty’s home which has now been made into a
museum. If I ever get down to Jackson,
Mississippi I would love to visit it.
The garden looks gorgeous.
This
year’s poetry read is Robert Lowell’s Collected
Poems, which I now realize is just too broad a collection. It’s an astonishing just under 1000 pages
worth of poetry, and then a couple of hundred pages of introduction, afterward,
notes, and index. There is no way I’m
going to cover this, so I’ll just try to find his most well known poems and
then randomly peruse some others.
Robert Lowellmight
just be the most important post WWII American poet in the canon. He is arguably the first poet to write in
what is called “Confessional Poetry.” As you can read in the Wikipedia entry, confessional poetry was a movement from
the post war through the 1960s where the subject matter were elements of a the
author’s life. Now of course poetry had
used biographical details before, but what I think made confessional poetry
different is the minutia of detail that poet dwells upon. It’s not just a mjaor event that frames a
lyric, but a developed composition around an obscure detail that many times the
poet doesn’t let the reader in on. It
presents a challenge to the reader.
There’s a dislocation; you can’t fully grasp what the poet is referring
to, and yet the poem is aesthetically whole.
In
addition, the lines in confessional poetry are usually matter-of-fact casual,
in free verse, and use very little poetical sound effects. It tries to capture a conversational tone, as
if a friend is speaking to another, all with the lingo and slang and inside
knowledge that is particular to them.
When confessional poetry succeeds, it really seems to capture a moment
in time like no other poetic form.
However, I will say that in my opinion it fails more often than not,
mainly because one ultimately says, so what, and given the lack of poetic
device, it becomes a “so what” that lacks craft. I will also say that I regard Lowell as the
best of the confessional poets. I’ll
have more on confessional poetry in subsequent posts, but let’s take a look at
a Lowell poem.
But
before we do so, I do need to post some biographical information, otherwise one
will be completely lost. Let me say up
front, I am hardly an expert on Lowell’s biography. I am
tempted to pick up a bio on his life (Paul Mariani’s Lost Puritan: Life of Robert Lowell seems like a good one) to help me with his work but I don’t know if I’ll really read it. Here are some of the pertinent facts of his
life that infiltrate his poems. He came
from a Massachusetts family that traced their roots to the Mayflower on his
father’s side and a signer of the Declaration of Independence on his mother’s. He had quite a few distinguished family
members (as listed in his Wikipedia entry) in American history. This historical link to his past would be an
important element to his poetry, as would the rebellion he would exhibit to his
family and to his family’s religion. He
came from a Puritanical Calvinism of which he rejected and for a good eight
years was a Roman Catholic convert. It’s
not clear to me why he left the Catholic Church but it could be related to his
several divorces. Still he took his Christianity
seriously but he never did accept his parent’s Calvinism. During World War II he was a conscientious
objector and was imprisoned, even though his father was naval Commander. He also was a prominent protestor of the
Vietnam War. The other important element
to his life was that he suffered from mental illness and was frequently
institutionalized. So if I were to sum
up the elements of his biography that frequent his work, it would be the
historicism of his family, his rebellion toward it, American history, his
Christianity, especially as an outsider, his objection to war, and his mental
health issues.
So
let’s look at this poem, “Waking in the Blue” which has its own Wikipedia
entry. It’s about waking up on a particular morning
while staying at a mental health hospital.
Waking in the Blue
By Robert Lowell
The night attendant, a
B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the
mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our
corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue
window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the
petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows
tense
as though a harpoon were
sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for
the "mentally ill.")
What use is my sense of
humour?
I grin at Stanley, now
sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard
all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build
of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the
Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile
in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his
figure,
of slimming on sherbert
and ginger ale--
more cut off from words
than a seal.
This is the way day
breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights
bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as
a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about
in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures
of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of
day,
hours and hours go by
under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little
nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic
attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the
Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New
England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred
pounds
this morning. Cock of the
walk,
I strut in my
turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving
mirrors,
and see the shaky future
grow familiar
in the pinched,
indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred
mental cases,
twice my age and half my
weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked
razor.
Let’s
look at that first stanza. Notice the
conversational tone. “B. U.” stands for
Boston University, and the night attendant fell asleep on a book titled The Meaning of Meaning, a complicated
philosophic book of epistemology, which I think in the context of a “house for
the ‘mentally ill’” is meant to be ironic.
I’m not exactly sure if the window is actually tinted blue and creates a
blue hue from the outside light or Lowell is suggesting the morning light
entering the room has a blue hue, but the blueness is critical to the
poem. It creates a tone suggesting a
Picasso painting from his “blue” period.
The
poem has the feel of a Picasso painting in that everyone—everyone except
perhaps the young night attendant who is the only one in the poem not mentally
ill—is askew, a delineation of fragmented faces. There are three specific mentally ill
characters in the poem: Stanley, the “once all-American fullback” taking a
bath, Bobbie who is swashbuckling naked, and the narrator, who is clearly
Lowell. There are also the “Roman
Catholic attendants”—it must be a Catholic hospital and the “pinched,
indigenous faces” of the other patients.
Both Stanley and Bobbie are much older, and poem’s climax is when Lowell
standing in front of the mirror shaving sees his “shaky future grow familiar”
in the lives of the other mentally ill. The
theme of the poem can be seen in the isolated line, “These victorious figures
of bravado ossified young.” Age plays an
important role in this poem. The poem
starts with a young man, who is rather nimble (he “catwalks” down the hall),
then transitions to two “ossified” old men and concludes with a middle age man
who looks into his future. Weight and
eating play an important role as well.
Stanley is obsessed with his once perfect physique, Bobbie is “roly-poly”
fat, and Lowell is getting fat. Sharp
objects are also a motif; the metaphoric harpoon that was threatening Lowell’s
heart in the first stanza, the imaginary sword of the swashbuckling Bobbie, and
the shaving razor on which the poem concludes.
That
last sentence is rather pregnant with meaning: “We are all old-timers,/each of
us holds a locked razor.” Is Lowell
referring to a sort of dueling razor fight with that last sentence? If so, that would seem to come out of
nowhere. Or is he suggesting a sort of
suicidal cutting of the wrists? Or
something else? I don’t really know, but
it does provide the poem with a sort of closing coda. I consider this is a really fine poem that
stretches the emotional range from melancholy to humor (“There are no
Mayflower/screwballs in the Catholic Church” – a dig at his parents) to contemplative
despondency.
