"Hawthorne"
“Hawthorne” is a poem that follows the footsteps of Nathanael Hawthorne through Salem, making a point of how much the city has changed from his day to the present time of Lowell’s contemporary account. What once was a thriving port has become dull and withered with age; a town without a purpose. In a masterful metaphor that speaks to the past while implicating the poem’s theme of the clouding of the spirit of a place, the Salem that was becomes frozen in time as a portrait.
“I cannot resilver the smudged plate.”
"For the Union Dead"
Although it does not occur until 17 lines into the poem “For the Union Dead” the most essential metaphor of the poem informs the reader that:
"Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston."
The essential quality is due to the poem an elegy for the memory of the great deeds of the past being shoved over with like sand castles to make room for monuments to the small needs of the present.
"Waking Early Sunday Morning"
This is a deeply symbolic poem that considers the Puritan promise of America as a City on a Hill fulfilling a covenant with God to make the New World a promised land in light of the contemporary state of the country seemingly on the verge of ripping apart during the turbulent 1960’s. The poem commences with an extended metaphor in which the speaker fantasizes of breaking free from the constrictions of this tarnished reality:
“O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –“
"History"
In this sonnet, Lowell makes an interesting observation about the difference between history and the historical record, suggesting through metaphor that historical record is an act with an end, whereas the historical life remains always lingering in the present.
"History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes."
"The Withdrawal"
One of Lowell’s simplest but most effective uses of metaphor is also one that so many people can relate top; especially, doubtlessly, those who also call Lowell’s New England home. The simple quality of the metaphor is almost certainly intentional as it pops up almost like a sudden realization that the poet has allowed himself to be carried away. Stopping himself, he creates a metaphor that is more like people talking and the rest of the stanza reads exactly like a person talking.
"Only today and just for this minute,
when the sunslant finds its true angle,
you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle
our gentle, fluffy tree—
suddenly the green summer is momentary...
Autumn is my favorite season—
why does it change clothes and withdraw?"
