Robert Lowell Collected Poems - Softcover

Lowell, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530327 ISBN 13: 9780374530327

Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

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Robert Lowell (1917–77) was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including Day by Day (FSG, 1977), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Life Studies (FSG, 1959).

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Collected Poems

By Robert Lowell

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 2007 Robert Lowell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374530327

Chapter One

Lord Weary's Castle

(1946)

TO JEAN

The Exile's Return There mounts in squalls a sort of rusty mire, Not ice, not snow, to leaguer the Httel De Ville, where braced pig-iron dragons grip The blizzard to their rigor mortis. A bell Grumbles when the reverberations strip The thatching from its spire, The search-guns click and spit and split up timber And nick the slate roofs on the Holstenwall Where torn-up tilestones crown the victor. Fall And winter, spring and summer, guns unlimber And lumber down the narrow gabled street Past your gray, sorry and ancestral house Where the dynamited walnut tree Shadows a squat, old, wind-torn gate and cows The Yankee commandant. You will not see Strutting children or meet The peg-leg and reproachful chancellor With a forget-me-not in his button-hole When the unseasoned liberators roll Into the Market Square, ground arms before The Rathaus; but already lily-stands Burgeon the risen Rhineland, and a rough Cathedral lifts its eye. Pleasant enough, Voi ch'entrate, and your life is in your hands. The Holy Innocents Listen, the hay-bells tinkle as the cart Wavers on rubber tires along the tar And cindered ice below the burlap mill And ale-wife run. The oxen drool and start In wonder at the fenders of a car, And blunder hugely up St. Peter's hill. These are the undefiled by woman-their Sorrow is not the sorrow of this world: King Herod shrieking vengeance at the curled Up knees of Jesus choking in the air, A king of speechless clods and infants. Still The world out-Herods Herod; and the year, The nineteen-hundred forty-fifth of grace, Lumbers with losses up the clinkered hill Of our purgation; and the oxen near The worn foundations of their resting-place, The holy manger where their bed is corn And holly torn for Christmas. If they die, As Jesus, in the harness, who will mourn? Lamb of the shepherds, Child, how still you lie. Colloquy in Black Rock Here the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean; My heart, you race and stagger and demand More blood-gangs for your nigger-brass percussions, Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion, Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand, Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions End in the mud-flat detritus of death. My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud Hungarian workmen give their blood For the martyre Stephen, who was stoned to death. Black Mud, a name to conjure with: O mud For watermelons gutted to the crust, Mud for the mole-tide harbor, mud for mouse, Mud for the armored Diesel fishing tubs that thud A year and a day to wind and tide; the dust Is on this skipping heart that shakes my house, House of our Savior who was hanged till death. My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud Stephen the martyre was broken down to blood: Our ransom is the rubble of his death. Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart, Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen's choir I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud Flies from his hunching wings and beak-my heart, The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire. Christmas in Black Rock Christ God's red shadow hangs upon the wall The dead leaf's echo on these hours Whose burden spindles to no breath at all; Hard at our heels the huntress moonlight towers And the green needles bristle at the glass Tiers of defense-plants where the treadmill night Churns up Long Island Sound with piston-fist. Tonight, my child, the lifeless leaves will mass, Heaving and heaping, as the swivelled light Burns on the bell-spar in the fruitless mist. Christ Child, your lips are lean and evergreen Tonight in Black Rock, and the moon Sidles outside into the needle-screen And strikes the hand that feeds you with a spoon Tonight, as drunken Polish night-shifts walk Over the causeway and their juke-box booms Hosannah in excelsis Domino. Tonight, my child, the foot-loose hallows stalk Us down in the blind alleys of our rooms; By the mined root the leaves will overflow. December, old leech, has leafed through Autumn's store Where Poland has unleashed its dogs To bay the moon upon the Black Rock shore: Under our windows, on the rotten logs The moonbeam, bobbing like an apple, snags The undertow. O Christ, the spiralling years Slither with child and manger to a ball Of ice; and what is man? We tear our rags To hang the Furies by their itching ears, And the green needles nail us to the wall. New Year's Day Again and then again ... the year is born To ice and death, and it will never do To skulk behind storm-windows by the stove To hear the postgirl sounding her French horn When the thin tidal ice is wearing through. Here is the understanding not to love Our neighbor, or tomorrow that will sieve Our resolutions. While we live, we live To snuff the smoke of victims. In the snow The kitten heaved its hindlegs, as if fouled, And died. We bent it in a Christmas box And scattered blazing weeds to scare the crow Until the snake-tailed sea-winds coughed and howled For alms outside the church whose double locks Wait for St. Peter, the distorted key. Under St. Peter's bell the parish sea Swells with its smelt into the burlap shack Where Joseph plucks his hand-lines like a harp, And hears the fearful Puer natus est Of Circumcision, and relives the wrack And howls of Jesus whom he holds. How sharp The burden of the Law before the beast: Time and the grindstone and the knife of God. The Child is born in blood, O child of blood. The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA) Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I. 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 leer, 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. We weight the body, close Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came, Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name Is blocked in yellow chalk. Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its hell-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute. II. Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers, As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374530327
• ISBN 13: 9780374530327
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 1186
• Herausgeber: Bidart Frank
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland