April 25, 2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell
Man and Wife
Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive… .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
[Lowell’s one of them Confessional poets, which means his work is all
tangled up in references to his own life, but I think this works even if you
don’t know that Miltown is an insane asylum, or all the latent, menacing
sexual imagery in the bedposts and Dionysus and the magnolia flowers.
I have been thinking about this as I go by magnolia trees on the
street. This poem’s strength lies in its contrasts — passion and
their tame embrace; youth and age; speech and silence; mother and
wife; heat and water. I find it a wonderful contrast to most love
poems, which are about newness and obsession, while this is quite the
opposite, the emotion which grows out of a long marriage.]
MORE LIKE THIS (all by Robert Lowell):
— “To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage” - a kind of companion to the
poem above, Lowell co-opts the voice of a (his?) wife, in a sort of
apology for his criticism of her in “Man and Wife” — here is the bed
and the magnolia blossoms and this time an oaf of a husband.
— For the Union Dead - about a statue in Boston of Civil War Colonel
Shaw (from the movie Glory, oh yeah), and about Boston and America and
war and patriotism and aquariums and television. So so good.
— Memories of West Street and Lepke - another poem contrasting the
present with past memories, this time of Lowell’s time in jail as a
conscientious objector, along with the mobster Czar Lepke.
