Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.

Rot and renewal often go together in Lowell, but what’s interesting here is the way water, the pinprick of rain, far from putting the fire out, becomes so much “more fuel,” bringing back troubling memories of childhood. Lowell now modulates “eye” and “tooth” imagery, culminating in “an eye for an eye, / a tooth for a tooth,” and the recognition that he can never avoid his fate: “Young, my eyes began to fail.” Now comes the climax

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on these waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.

I can’t think of a more effective rhyme than “oil”/”turmoil.” The poet’s “turmoil” contains that “oil,” but he can’t channel it in any useful way. And then the self-deprecation: “I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.” As if to say, “Enough already. Don’t take yourself so seriously.”

So here are nine quatrains, irregularly rhyming, that come to the conclusion that there’s no oil for the turmoil, or again, no oil, only turmoil, turmoil nicely alliterating with “tired” used twice in the last line. The poem is personal but not confessional in an overblown way: we don’t know what it is that the poet has done and why he can’t be forgiven. It is all objectified and there are only hints and guesses.

In such poems, Lowell remains the master: he generates strong emotions in the reader because his own pain is so perfectly rendered in phrase after phrase. “Of rot on the red roof” is another lovely line. So the Selected Poems does give us a chance to rethink Lowell’s poetry and its place today.

DW: It’s interesting that our choices represent two very distinct sides of Lowell. I suppose the ending of “Florence” typifies his almost obsessive desire to make Big Generalizing Statements, and when that desire doesn’t devolve into mere grandiosity, he can be positively majestic. “Eye and Tooth” shows a more intimate and demotic side of Lowell, shows that capacity for making the familiar strange that he so envied in Bishop. (Of course, it too ends with a statement, and one that a lot of people would say—pejoratively—epitomizes Lowell.) The two modes aren’t polarities, really, but there aren’t a lot of poems in which they effectively merge: “For the Union Dead,” surely, but not many others. I think he’s trying to find a way out of this dilemma in Day by Day—he seems more able to move toward statement without the need to signal it with a drum roll, and he also more regularly comes “’a little nearer / the language of the tribe,’” as “Morning after Dining with a Friend” puts it. (He’s putting these words into the mouth of his friend William Meredith here, but this is certainly a goal he’s striving for in the last book.) He seemed on the verge of another stylistic breakthrough in the final poems, and it’s sad that we didn’t get to see the results.