Free Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton Page B

matching of the poet’s maturity in free verse with the growing up of the child-hero of the family poems may not have been planned out, but its dramatic rightness does give credence to Lowell’s contention that “I see the ‘Life Studies’ sequence as one poem, at least in the first section. It really centers about my father and the parts are not meant to stand by themselves.” 29
    Section II of the “Life Studies” sequence has four poems—each of them bitingly personal but offering a broader view of Lowell’s life so far: in each he tries to face the crippling and destructive “ side-effects ” of his recurrent mental breakdowns. One consequence is that he no longer trusts his old intellectual vehemence and he knows that others trust it even less: his verbal brilliance they now associate with “the kingdom of the mad—its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye”; it frightens them. He knows too that when he was a “ fire-breathing Catholic C.O.” and refused military service, he may well have been in the grip of energies that must now, if he is to live any sort of “normal life,” be “tranquillized.” It is no real comfort that his own prescribed inertia is mirrored in the self-serving complacency of Eisenhower’s America, that
                          even the man
    scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans
    has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
    and is a “young Republican.”
    But then what are “ideals” worth if they can only be pursued in mania? And what is a sane professor’s life in Boston worth if “ excitement ”or “enthusiasm” is always to be thought of as a symptom of destruction and collapse?
    The first version of the poem “Man and Wife” was called “Holy Matrimony,” and it included an early draft of what was later to become the separate “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” (printed in Life Studies next to “Man and Wife”). Although uncompleted and unpolished, it provides a powerful insight into the “political” background of a poem in which references to “the Rahvs” (Philip Rahv was editor of Partisan Review during the most vehement period of its history) and “the traditional South” have seemed to some critics overintimate or incidental. “Holy Matrimony ” also makes it clear that the “old-fashioned tirade” referred to in “Man and Wife” is in fact the substance of the next poem in the book—“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”—although recast into the third person.
    At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
    Blossoms on our Saucer Magnolia ignite
    For their feverish five days white….
    Last night I held your hands, Petite ,
    Subtlest of all God’s creatures, still pure nerve,
    Still purer nerve than I,
    Who, hand on glass
    And heart in mouth,
    Outdrank the Rahvs once in the heat
    Of Greenwich Village, and sat at your feet—
    Too boiled and shy
    And poker-faced to make a pass,
    While the shrill verve
    Of your invective scorched the solid South.
    On warm spring night [ sic ] though, we can hear the outcry,
    If our windows are open wide,
    I can hear the South End,
    The razor’s edge
    Of Boston’s negro culture. They as we
    Refine past culture’s possibility,
    Fear homocide [ sic ],
    Grow horny with alcohol, take the pledge …
    At forty why pretend
    It’s just the others, not ourselves, who die?
    And now you turn your back,
    Sleepless, you hold
    Your pillow to your hollows like a child,
    And once again,
    The merciless Racinian tirade
    Breaks like the Atlantic on my head:
    “It’s the injustice … you are so unjust.
    There’s nothing accommodating, nice or kind—
    But What can I do for you? What can I do for you,
    Shambling into our bed at two
    With all the monotonous sourness of your lust,
    A tusked heart, an alcoholic’s mind,
    And blind, blind, blind
    Drunk! Have pity! My worst evil
    Is living at your level.
    My mind
    Moves like a water-spider….
    The legs stick and break in your