1 A threefold sorrow has here found for itself a single expression. Part of the poem was written in 1850, after the death of Lowell's third daughter, Rose, only six months and a half old. I shall never forget,' he said at this time, the feeling I had when little Blanche's coffin was brought into the house. It was refreshed again lately. But for Rose I would have no funeral.. She was a lovely child — we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful-fair, with large dark-gray eyes and fine features. . . . Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.' There follow, in Lowell's letter, six stanzas of this poem, in an earlier form. Into it is interwoven the memory of his oldest child, Blanche, especially perhaps in the last stanza. After Blanche was buried' says Scudder in his Life of Lowell, her father took her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his chamber. There they stayed till his own death.' But it was the death of Lowell's wife that gave to the poem its real intensity. The second to fourth stanzas, and the seventh to twelfth, were written in a mood which made Lowell say later: Something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. I hope you may never have reason to like "After the Burial" better than you do.' The same interweaving is found in 'Under the Willows,' of which Lowell says: Something more than half of it was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, would come in against my will.' Lowell said of this poem later, 'A living verse can only be made of a living experience and that our own. One of my most personal poems, "After the Burial," has roused strange echoes in men who assured me they were generally insensible to poetry. After all, the only stuff a solitary man has to spin is himself.' (The extracts from Lowell's Letters are quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.) It is pagan; but wait till you feel it, — That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to our primitive rock. Communion in spirit! Forgive me, 40 But I, who am earthly and weak, Would give all my incomes from dreamland For a touch of her hand on my cheek. Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! I haunt the pine-dark solitudes, With soft brown silence carpeted, And plot to snare thee in the woods: Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled ! I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; 10 All Nature with thy parting thrills, Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips Where thou has dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot, And through my frame strange raptures shoot; All of thee but thyself I grasp; I seem to fold thy luring shape, One mask and then another drops, Sometimes with flooded ear I list, 20 30 Through mountains, forests, open downs, For thou hast slipt from it and me Not weary yet, I still must seek, Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare, 40 50 Making the Mob a moment fine Their cramped ideal soaring free; Through every shape thou well canst run, Its peaks and pinnacles of ice 60 70 I track thee over carpets deep To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors 'Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field's fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; I dog thee through the market's throngs Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'ertake, But here a voice, I know not whence, Sets the wide chimney in a roar, 80 100 130 'Harass her not: thy heat and stir 1855? For Raphael and for Angelo, The shadows deepened, and I turned And who were they,' I mused, 'that wrought Through pathless wilds, with labor long, The highways of our daily thought? Who reared those towers of earliest song That lift us from the crowd to peace Remote in sunny silences?' 1860. WHEN wise Minerva still was young And just the least romantic, MASACCIO IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL He came to Florence long ago, And painted here these walls, that shone Soon after from Jove's head she flung That preternatural antic, "T is said, to keep from idleness Or flirting, those twin curses, She spent her leisure, more or less, In writing po, no, verses. sung! At the first pause Zeus said, 'Well Fine very fine! but I must go; They stand in need of me there; Excuse me!' snatched his stick, and so Plunged down the gladdened ether. With the next gap, Mars said, 'For me Then Venus lisped, 'I'm sorely tried, 20 30 His words woke Hermes. Ah!' he said, 'I so love moral theses!' Then winked at Hebe, who turned red, 40 50 Zeus snored, o'er startled Greece there flew The many-volumed thunder. Proud Pallas sighed, 'It will not do; Then, packing up a peplus clean, A Sunday-school in Athens. The verses? Some in ocean swilled, Years after, when a poet asked The Goddess's opinion, As one whose soul its wings had tasked Put all your beauty in your rhymes, THE DEAD HOUSE 2 60 70 80 1857. 1 HERE once my step was quickened, 1 In the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, of which Lowell was editor. 2 I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with Sacred to the memory of a HOME' on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it. (Lowell's Letters, vol. i, pp. 283, 284. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.) For the first form of the poem, see Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, pp. 435-437. |