attendants
(there are no blue-blooded
old Boston screwballs in the Catholic Church)
Ann, what use is my ability
for shooting the bull,
far from your Valkyrie body,
your gold-brown hair,
your robust uprightness—you, brisk
yet discrete [ sic ] in your conversation!
II
(a week later)
The night-attendant, a B.U. student,
rouses his cobwebby eyes
propped on his Social Relations text-book,
prowls drowsily down our corridor….
Soon, soon the solitude of Allah, azure day-break,
will make my agonized window bleaker.
What greater glory than recapturing the moment of glory
in miseria?
Snow’s falling. Farther off in time,
a more illuminating snow:
on the slopes of the Mittelsell,
near Franconia, topped by Mount Washington,
you loom back to me, Ann,
tears in your eyes, icicles on your eyelashes,
bridal Norwegian fringe
on your coat, the wooly lining of a coat.
Your salmon lioness face is dawn.
The bracelet on your right wrist jingles with trophies:
The enamelled Harvard pennant,
the round medallion of St. Mark’s School.
I could claim both,
for both were supplied by earlier,
now defunct claimants,
and my gold ring, almost half an inch wide,
now crowns your bracelet, cock of the walk there.
My Goddess…. But where in literature
has a goddess been able to stand up
to flesh and blood?
A lioness, then. With Descartes
I can almost lower animals to the realm of machines.
Ann, how can I charade you
In a lioness’s wormy hide?—
massive, tawny, playful, lythe [ sic ]?
God be thanked, I now weigh 200 pounds,
have been a man for forty years;
You are 19,
see me still a St. Mark’s sixth former,
my symbol the Evangelist’s winged lion! 1
From these diffuse beginnings, the finished poem—worked on over a period of three months—was to become a supreme example of Lowell’s new “informality,” an informality seamed with high instinctive artifice (if such were possible!): small, almost whispered intrusions of alliteration and half-rhyme, a shrewd, suspenseful balancing of short and long lines, an almost ceremonial tightening here and there into strict meter or heroic couplet. In his first draft, Lowell really is informal, hasty, talkative; in the completed poem he makes every accent and line break earn its formal keep—he elevates exuberant chatter into haunting, measured eloquence:
WAKING IN THE BLUE
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 heart 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 humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard ail-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet 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