Summary
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” by Robert Lowell begins with a dedication to “Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea,” referring to a cousin of Lowell’s whose vessel disappeared during World War II. Lowell also includes an epigraph from Genesis in the Bible, in which God giving man dominion over all other creatures. The poem starts by describing a scene where a fleet pulls up to a man’s corpse, then push it back into the ocean. The speaker then references the captain from Moby-Dick who dies in the water.
This first section then moves to describe the “hell-bent deity” of the sea. The speaker emphasizes the ocean’s power, how it is forever “unwearied” by its own endless movement. No one is foolish enough to ask anything of it; instead, the ship fires its guns in a “hoarse salute.” Even gunfire is nothing to the ocean.
The second stanza focuses in on a “you,” who seems to be Winslow, the character who has died. It seems that this death has affected the wind, which in turn affects the birds that “tremble at your death/In these home waters.” This death has such far-reaching consequences, at least to the speaker, that though Lowell does not know where exactly his cousin perished, his loss touches even local ports. The speaker continues referencing Moby-Dick, this time mentioning the Pequod, the whaling ship from that novel. In this stanza, the speaker describes how the winds fight the sea for his cousin. He describes an “old Quaker graveyard” drenched in water from the ocean, where the dead bodies cry out in sympathy for whale wounded in the hunt.
In the next stanza, the speaker focuses first on the ocean, then again on the dead Quaker sailors who died in the water. Something was lost when they died; but the speaker does not explain what it is that has been lost beyond calling it a “secret.” The speaker sees and hears the Quakers praise God for saving them; this is belied by the clear fact that he has not saved them.
The fourth section is the first to appear in two stanzas. The sailors from the Pequod, like Lowell’s cousin, die in the water, overturned by the whale they sought to capture. The whale, too, seems to be on its way out; it is injured, bleeding heavily. The speaker reminds the readers that the sea remains sovereign by begging to it and referring to it as “O depths.”
The water folds down upon itself as if it were dying. Lowell makes this connection to death literal by referring to the “death-rattle of the crabs.” He says, “This is the end of running on the waves;/We are poured out like water.” He seems to refer to his cousin, or perhaps Ahab the captain, when he mentions a “master of Leviathans” lashed to the mast of his ship, and speaks of the futility of trying to “dance” him up from his grave.
The fifth section of this poem describes the death of the whale as its innards fall out of it. Lowell likens them to the corruption that “overruns this world.” The speaker asks the sailor if his sword will “whistle and fall and sink into the fat,” and then watches and describes the whale being cut to pieces. However, the ships still sink; the sea “dismembers” the ship’s flag. The stanza ends on a character who we have not encountered previously, Jonas Messias; his name is a clear reference to Jonah and the Messiah. By combining the two characters, this character seems like Jonah from the Bible, but one who is able to save himself without appealing to God, as Jonah did in the belly of the whale, because he himself is God (the Messiah). The speaker asks him to hide “our steel” in his side. This appears to be a reference to how Jonah was stuck inside the whale, but also to how the swords earlier in this stanza ripped the whale apart.
The penultimate section of this poem is split into two parts, and it is the only section given its own title, which is “OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM.” This title refers to a church in England associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a noblewoman in 1061. In less vivid language the speaker describes a pilgrimage. Some of the poem’s earlier heaviness seems to be alleviated, leaving behind a clarity. “Sailor, you were glad/And whistled Sion by that stream,” the speaker says.
The next stanza, though holding onto more precise, less verbose style, looks closely at the face of the statue of the Virgin at the altar and finds it empty. Yet that emptiness is godliness, or close to the speaker's perception of God.
The final, seventh section of the poem begins in the graveyard again, where the weather is stormy. Now the speaker addresses the Atlantic Ocean, calling it out for all it has devoured. You could cut the air above the Atlantic open like a tree trunk and find rings from the beginning of time, when God formed man from the sea. The speaker says, “And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill,” seeming to refer to men; made in the sea’s image, they are naturally violent. The poem ends on the line, “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.” He outlives everything else in the poem, despite his erratic will.
Analysis
The first image in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is hellish but clear. The speaker is a member of a crew that pulls up a body from the water. The speaker describes the corpse in a way that makes him appear to still be alive; for instance, “he grappled at the net.” The language moves into slightly more abstract territory toward the end of the stanza, where Lowell says, “…the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose/On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name/Is blocked in yellow chalk.” Ahab is a reference to the tyrannical captain in Moby-Dick, who ends up dying in his quest to capture a singular and terrifying white whale. Ahab and this dead sailor inhabit the same water, and these drowned men are no doubt a reference to the true subject of the poem, Lowell’s cousin, who died at sea during World War II. Lowell seems to finds himself most comfortable referring to his cousin through allegory, at least in this stanza.
The first line of the poem is written in iambic pentameter, then the second line breaks it, suitably doing so while describing the breaking of the waves. The first line of every stanza follows suit, with the exception of the line, “This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale,” which adds an extra syllable but still retains iambs. Indeed many of the lines in this poem follow iambic pentameter, but many of them break it, sometimes because they are enjambed to retain the rhyme scheme. Other times Lowell incorporates trochees (“Snatching at straws to sail…” “Wooden and childish…”), and the occasional anapest.
The poem seems careful but unreliable, its form ready to give way at any moment—like the unstable sea itself. The first stanza makes clear how the rhyme scheme will remain consistent but variable throughout the poem. The reader knows to expect rhymes, but can never be sure where they will fall. This imitates choppy water while highlighting the speaker's instability and the rockiness of grief, as well as the speaker's instability in his faith. At the same time, the poem reads almost like biblical verses due to its density, but where those verses can be broken down and more easily digested, some lines in this poem remain slightly beyond sense no matter how closely the reader examines them.
For example, Lowell's reference to Ahab’s head as a “void and forehead” is difficult to parse and does not reveal a concrete meaning. The moment, however, is tempered by the next line, where Ahab's name is written on his forehead or his coffin, somewhere concrete. Lowell also refers to Orpheus, the demigod from a Greek myth, in which Orpheus's skill with the lyre convinces Hades to release his wife from the Underworld. But in this scene, "no Orphean lute" can "pluck life back"; the sailor is gone forever, so the body goes overboard. The speaker admits that this seems like a bad omen, but points out that he has already put his fate in the hands of the unpredictable ocean. The speaker describes the sounds of guns firing in a salute on a ship. They are unconvincing and "hoarse" against the power of the sea, which is a “hell-bent deity.” Man and his weapons appear puny and powerless compared to the ocean; this contradicts the magnitude of grief that just one sailor's death can cause. This contradiction allows the speaker a layered perspective, so he is able to feel a personal loss while simultaneously looking at war's effects on the human race.
The two perspectives are presented as one in Section II, where the speaker feels like the entire world mourns his cousin. “Whenever winds are moving….The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death,” the speaker says, implying that this death causes the wind to howl. But this wind, though it “wrings [the sea] in the slush/Of this old Quaker Graveyard,” does not have the power to bring the “Sailor” back, either.
Several times throughout this poem, the speaker mentions some knowledge the drowned sailors gain, that is then lost with their lives. The third stanza begins like this, referring to what Lowell’s cousin “recovered” from Poseidon as “harrowed brine” that is then useless against the ocean. He then refers to “whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost/in the mad scramble” again several lines down. This connects the cousin to these drowned Quaker sailors, but does not reveal what it was that they had and lost in common. “What it cost/Them is their secret,” Lowell says.
Section III refers to the period when the Quakers died as “open eyed,/Wooden and childish.” The Quakers share this naivety. They repeat their praise to God like prayers, but they drown regardless.
One interesting part of this section is the part where Lowell refers to the whale by the name “IS.” Critics like Hugh Staples, who wrote the book Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years in 1962, tend to agree that this was Lowell’s way of assigning Christ’s identity to the whale: a reference both to the Latin name for Jesus (Iesus Salvator, Jesus the Savior) and perhaps to Exodus 3:14, where God reveals his name to Moses as "I AM." Assigning divinity to the whale complicates the poem; if the whale is Christ, is the sea God? If the whale is Christ, are those who died pursuing it —like Ahab, and the whaling Quakers—righteous and saved, or are they doomed for attempting to defy nature? What about Lowell’s cousin? Lowell offers no clear answers, and the confusion indicates that the speaker does not feel he has a foothold in his faith.
Section IV begins with the line, “This is the end.” The chase for the whale is over, as it has led the sailors to their death. Yet the whale, too, is at its end. Even the ocean does its best to die, withdrawing into itself. “This is the end of running on the waves;/We are poured out like water,” the speaker says. This seems to reference both technological naval progress and the Biblical notion of Christ walking on water. However, the use of the word “we” indicates that this moment is about humanity in general, not just sailors. The image of being “poured out like water” suggests that existence is ephemeral.
Section IV ends on the lines, “Who will dance/The mast-lashed master of Leviathans/Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?” Here Lowell mixes references from Homer's Odyssey and the Bible with recent history, and the blurring of the stories emphasizes the speaker’s anxiety about his faith. He compares his cousin to Odysseus, who tied himself to his ship’s mast so he could listen to the sirens without being tempted to jump overboard. But this character also conquers Leviathans, the great sea monsters from the Bible. But because the “master” is still lashed to the mast, Lowell changes the story to match that of his cousin and the Quaker sailors. This line conveys the uselessness of grief. No matter how one allegorizes the deceased, nothing can bring them back.
Section V begins by asking the Sailor if he will let his sword “whistle and fall and sink into the fat.” At this point, however, the whale is already dead; its insides, “the roll/Of its corruption,” have spread beyond New England and fill the world. The speaker does not clarify whether the Sailor is joining in the massacre or letting it happen. Either way, the speaker keeps him as a focus while describing the massacre, addressing him once again by saying, “Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,/Sailor, and gulls go round the stove timbers.” Though this poem is mourning each incarnation of the Sailor, it also criticizes his position; he is part of what kills the whale. After the whale’s death, however, “…the morning stars sing out together/And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers/The red flag hammered in the mast-head.” The earth and stars themselves are on the whale’s side, and the dropping of the flag foreshadows an ugly punishment for the sailors. This is also another reference to Moby-Dick, in which the sailors on the Pequod try to nail a new flag to the mast as the ship sinks.
This stanza ends on the curious line, “Hide/Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.” The character “Jonas Messias” seems to refer both to Jonah, the biblical character who lived for three days in the belly of a whale, and the Messiah, or Christ, whom this poem has identified with the whale. Is this line directed at the Sailor, or at the whale? The speaker seems to ask for forgiveness for the butchering, but the plea collapses on itself; the whale cannot hide its own slaughter. This plea, if it is directed at the whale, strengthens its connection to Christ, for the speaker asks it to do something for those who betrayed and killed it.
In this section the poem finds its dramatic peak, and this may be why Lowell cuts away from the scene of the butchering to the scene in a section titled, “Our Lady of Walsingham.” This refers to a site of the same name in England where a noblewoman saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary, commanding her to have a structure built to imitate the home in which the Annunciation occurred. At first, this section sounds like a tale or allegory, beginning by saying, “There once the penitents took off their shoes.” The words “There once” indicate that this is a moment in the distant past, as does the pastoral scenery. However, at the end of this relatively short stanza, the speaker finds the Sailor, saying, “Sailor, you were glad/And whistled Sion by that stream.”
In this section the poem describes a peaceful scene for the first time, giving the readers a break from the stormy earlier scenes. However, Lowell does not entirely lose his turbulent syntax, particularly with the line “Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad/The castle of God.” Lowell shifts his gaze to the statue of the Virgin Mary, who is small compared to the structure. He finds her face expressionless. He says, “As before,/This face, for centuries a memory,/Non est species, neque decor,/Expressionless, expressed God,” referencing the destruction and reconstruction of this shrine but not blaming that for its emptiness. Here the speaker's tone is difficult to read, like the Virgin’s face. Her secretiveness to the speaker reflects God’s secretiveness. She remains inaccessible, and the act of pilgrimage does not seem to reach her.
The last line of this section, “the world shall come to Walsingham” indicates how religion has evolved to include pilgrimages to sites like those. The speaker's intentions remain unclear, but he seems to point out how people will blindly follow their faith, and that the secrets of God will continue to evade them nonetheless.
The first six lines of Section VII are back in the desolate graveyard. The winds are empty and “creaking,” and an oak tree slaps against the cenotaph; with this image, Lowell reminds the readers of the bodies that go unrecovered from deaths at sea. In the water, the waves crash against a buoy. Instead of addressing the Sailor, the speaker addresses the Atlantic itself, blaming it for the deaths it causes.
The speaker then says, “You could cut the brackish winds with a knife/Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time/When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime.” No longer does the “you” seem to refer to the Atlantic. In this stanza the speaker feels like he has accessed the moment of creation. This is foiled by the last lines, where the creation of man leads to “blue-lung’d combers [lumbering] to the kill.” “Combers” is a word for a certain kind of wave, which makes sense in this context, but the way they move to kill is reminiscent of how the sailors kill the whale in Section V. This ambiguity gives this last stanza a double meaning. One way to interpret the “combers” is as waves that kill men at God’s will; if the combers are in fact men doing God’s will, however, it would imply that God has made mankind violent and that they are unable to resist those impulses. This complexity allows the stanza to deal with Lowell’s personal grief about his cousin’s senseless death at sea, while also looking at the senseless violence of the war—which is why his cousin was at sea in the first place.
The last line is a simple statement, but in context it reads almost spitefully. “The Lord,” whose will causes everything, remains beyond the consequences of his actions. By saying that God “survives,” the speaker hints that God was in some sort of danger, but despite the senselessness of the world, no one turns against him. People continue to make their pilgrimage to his sites, and the Quaker whalers praise him from beyond the grave. By ending the poem on this line, Lowell forces the readers to question God as he does.
