Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”
Robert Lowell
1917-1977
Epilogue
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
When I was in graduate school the ‘great’ poet of the day was Robert Lowell. Others who wrote in his era, most notably Elizabeth Bishop, are now, seen through the light of history, greater poets. Others at the time, and I think of Theodore Roethke and Allen Ginsberg, spoke to me more deeply. Yet as years and years have passed, I have revisited Lowell again and again. He had famous antecedents –
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God –
including poets such as Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell, judges, a president of Harvard, advisors to American presidents. It was clear to everyone, including himself, that Robert Lowell suffered under the weight of this familial past. His long American legacy was not something I, a child of refugees from Nazi Germany, could then, or can now, relate to. And yet . . . .
Robert Lowell sure could write poetry. A manic-depressive who was especially hard on women (he had three tumultuous marriages), he made a remarkable choice to write about both his family and himself, unvarnished, in his breakthrough volume of 1958, Life Studies. In that book, he revealed the deficiencies of his parents, his unsuitability as a marriage partner, his ever-incipient madness, his institutionalization for depression, his imprisonment as a conscientious objector. The book was to change the course of writing in American poetry, along with similar ‘confessional’ works of the same period by Ginsburg, Roethke, W. D. Snodgrass, and to a lesser degree Lowell’s his friend and mentor Elizabeth Bishop. Life Studies also eschewed the formal poetic style of his earlier verse in favor of a supple, idiomatic free verse very much shaped by the example of William Carlos Williams.
The turn into the confessional mode – a term Lowell did not like – brought to his poems an elemental power, that of self-revelation. Poems mattered because they stripped away the veneer of social constraint, and found great force by the revelation of the too-often unmentionable wellsprings of his inner self. Lowell’s two most famous students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, would follow his lead and go perhaps even further, all three accruing a power that was undeniable: The self, revealed with all its deficiencies, would hold readers spellbound. To overhear what was theretofore revealed only in the confession box in Catholic churches, or on couches in psychoanalyst’s offices, was to gain access to secret and powerful shaping forces of the self. Or, it may be, the power came from the understanding that scandalous gossip always secures an audience….
That power of revelation was achieved at a cost, and the cost was the shift of focus from the outer world, that vast domain of objects and relations that exist outside the self, to one’s personal history and inner conflicts. Lowell, more than Plath or Sexton or Roethke (though not Ginsberg) always understood the vast importance of his era, and his society, to the verse that a poet created. Still, the fateful turn inward was there, and dominated not only Lowell’s poetry, but American poetry in general, for decades.
So we come to the poem which heads up this letter, his “Epilogue,” which he placed as the last poem in his Collected Poems. It is, I think, a remarkable poem. It looks back on his life, and forward to his limitations in writing poems: Lowell sees, all too clearly, that the turn to ‘confessional’ poetry has been a limitation and not an unalloyed success.
The poem begins with a complaint:
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
Why, as a poet, can he not call upon the devices of literature (plot and rhyme) as he faces a page and wants to start writing? All he can do, he complains, is to ‘recall’ what has happened; he cannot invent a world through the exercise of the imagination. He is too factual, too historical, too devoted to what actually occurred, to ‘imagine’ a world upon the page.
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
Let us not move through the poem too quickly. In the first of these lines, he focuses directly on what his trouble is: “I hear the noise of my own voice.” The self, the ‘I’ which is always present and speaking and thus renders difficult the hearing and seeing of others with clarity, makes a noise that surrounds him. The self intrudes, and he cannot hear clearly. Too much “noise.”
Moreover, painting is not camera work. While a lens captures ‘what is there’ in front of the painter, it lacks the imaginative sense of ‘the whole’ and ‘the truth’ that distinguishes painting from photography. Painting “trembles to caress the light,” which is to say that there is an ‘aura’ to things which no lens can capture. This is what Wallace Stevens was referring to when he wrote, “with our bones/ We left much more, left what still is/ The look of things, left what we felt/ At what we saw.” The feeling of the world: This, in Lowell’s view, the lens cannot capture, but the painter can. The painter whose vision “trembles to caress the light.”
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
His eye is “threadbare.” It only sees the world as it appears, not the world as it is felt, with a halo of intuited feeling, with the lambent light which is part of the world we live in and not of the photograph. All he can manage, as a poet, is the “snapshot.” What a run of modifiers Lowell gives us! “Lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,/heightened from life.” Ah, but the snapshot is, as all snapshots are, “paralyzed by fact.” He can show us what is there, without the wonderful light which plays over the people in paintings but not in ‘Kodak snapshot’ moments. “All’s misalliance.”
“All’s misalliance.” He, who would be a poet, painting the world as he feels it, can only show what is before him, unassisted by an imagination which seizes the ‘more’ that is life and not fact.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
This is his answer. So what if it is a snapshot: “Yet why not say what in which the painter truly “caress[es] the light ” In every painting by Jan Vermeer, the Dutch artist caresses the light, nowhere more than in these three paintings: “The Milkmaid, ““Girl with a Pearl Earring,” and “Woman Holding a Balance.” [I had included, in an earlier draft, links to websites where these paintings could be found, but the increasing prevalence of Spam filters means that I can no longer include web links. So, to see the paintings, go to your browser and click ‘The Milkmaid Vermeer,’ and ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring Vermeer’ and ‘Woman holding a Balance Vermeer’. All the images on Wikipedia are excellent.] Vermeer, the great artist of falling light.
[A parenthetical note. Years ago I taught this poem in an introductory poetry class, and none of the students in either class I was teaching that semester – 70 students in total – knew who ‘Vermeer’ was. This despite the fact that, coming largely from the New York, Washington and Boston regions, roughly half of the known Vermeer paintings were exhibited in museums near their homes. Nor could they recognize that Vermeer was (by my estimation) the first great artist to show the middle class to itself: The middle class, the background of so many of my students, can see itself in his paintings. Where else might they go to see who they were, how their social position stood revealed at its first appearance to the world, what luminous beauty shone forth from those bourgeois figures, except in Vermeer? And yet they knew nothing of him or his work. So, then and there, I decided that henceforward I would never teach another poetry course without including some painters and paintings. Literacy is not just a matter of reading, of encountering poetry and other texts. Images as well as words are part of our cultural ‘literacy.’]
Vermeer’s women are “solid with yearning,” bathed in the light which streams across the canvas. That light is what Lowell seeks, and what he cannot find. Solidity felt is what he seeks, and that can come only through a light that reveals what is actual in the world. Yet for him, “All’s misalliance.” Aieee. The pieces of his world do not fit. All he can come up with are snapshots. (The camera can capture much, and we rightly admire photographs. But Lowell understands that the line between snapshots and photographs is not all that clear.)
And then the poem moves on to Lowell’s magnificent conclusion. Although he acknowledges that Vermeer is the height of magnificence, yet in our modern age, shackled by facticity, by the need to be accurate about what has happened, we should, even if we have to settle, be faithful to what we have.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Surely Lowell had Macbeth in mind as he wrote the first line of the final quatrain,
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Poor passing facts. Even as the ongoingness of time consigns us to meaninglessness, one can “name” that which passes and so give it recognition and perhaps a certain permanence.
Lowell is hard, very hard, on himself in this poem. The poem’s title, “Epilogue,’ suggests it is his final summing up, his last word. He confesses that he cannot bathe his portraits of life in the light which streams from the brushes of the great masters, who saw more than the facts before them. (We can recognize that he is a photographer, not a taker of snapshots.) Still, he says, there is a virtue to verisimilitude. His art is reduced from the greatness of those who came before, but it is of some value nonetheless.
I marvel at the poem. It takes the measure of our modern existence, so concerned with getting what is there that it diminishes the importance of imagination in realizing – making real – what is truly there. And yet the poem, and Lowell, are willing to settle for smaller virtues. We, and the things of our lives, are named . . . .
One must beware of nostalgia, of valorizing the past as somehow superior to the present. But our own immersion in fact and technology and science comes with a price, and in this poem Lowell acknowledges the price. The light of things evades our sight. We see that the light is there, illuminating facts, but not the glory of its being there. Critics have argued that Homer in his day saw things with greater clarity, greater nearness to the perceiving self, than we are capable of seeing today. Poets, most especially Wordsworth in “The World is Too Much with Us” and his contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin in such poems as “Bread and Wine” have understood the same thing, and much earlier.
We have gained much in our relentless surge forward to treat cancer, to explore outer space, to understand vast troves of data through digital means, but we have also lost things. For Wordsworth, we have lost a closeness to the life that one finds in nature; for Hölderlin, we have lost a closeness to the supernatural force that runs through all things. For Lowell, what we have lost is a deep understanding of ourselves, even as we ‘notate’ the precise dimensions of those very selves. To Lowell, this ‘progress’ may be a bad bargain, but it is the only bargain we have. “Why not say what happened…[and] give/each figure in the photograph/his living name?”