The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
If only because of the sheer volume of his prodigious output, any assertion that one line or another of Lowell’s verse is more famous than another is up for argument. What is certainly beyond question is that the final of this poem is among the most studied of all his closing lines. In a not-short poem that calls on allusions to Moby-Dick, a shrine in England to which monarchs made pilgrimages, the Book of Jonah and the Bible’s great sea monster, Leviathan as well as the WWII ship explosion which claimed the life of his the poet’s cousin (who is also referenced in the epigraph), this final line has proven to be troubling in for scholars and academics to get a firm handle on. At least not a firm enough handle that there is universal agreement on what the speaker is trying to say when he finally works his way to summing things up.
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
The 1973 collection of verse titled “The Dolphin” seemed to many to push the boundaries of confessional poetry beyond all acceptable levels of good taste. The poetry details the end of one marriage during the falling in love with the women who would become his next wife. Without her consent, the poet also introduced letters written in anger by the women poised for replacement. In the collection’s final poem, the Dolphin here is the poet’s reference to that replacement—muse and subsequent bride—Caroline Blackwood.
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boyOn Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
This is a very effective demonstration of the use of the poet device known as enjambment in which a though beginning at the end of one stanza continues over to the beginning of the next. What makes this an especially illustrative use of the device is that the poem connects two different periods in the life of its titular star, Jonathan Edwards, during which time his interest in spiders were applied quite differently. In the first part of quote above, Lowell penetrates into the mind of the older Edwards as a Puritan minister using spiders as metaphors in his powerful sermons. The leap made by the use of enjambment allows the adult Edwards to go back in time to when he was an 11-year-old precocious child studying spiders for purely scientific reasons.
My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")
Before Sylvia Plath, her mentor wrote confessional poetry of spending time in a mental health facility. The same one, in fact. This poem is Lowell’s metaphorically-rich, image-laden and almost psychedelically structured recollection in verse of spending time among the patients at the e McLean Hospital outside Boston. As one might expect, the poem is overall of a kind of a nightmarish intensity that leans toward dramatic. Lowell, never a poet exactly famous for his humor, inserts an unexpected and atypical rhyming couplet here to underline the comic tone at near the beginning before plunging the reader headlong into the world of the mental patient.
