L: Robert Lowell

'To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage'

The letter ‘L’ was a difficult choice for dead poets, for me. The obvious one was Larkin, but I don’t like him. I’ve tried, I did for a while, and now I don’t again. I do like Audre Lorde, but my favourite work of hers is in her prose essays and polemics. I also like Thomas Lux, and considered one or two of his poems – but when I tried to write about them they somehow didn’t really lend themselves to the sort of close reading I’ve been doing. That was interesting to me: does that say something about the nature and quality of Lux’s poetry? I don’t think so. Does it say something about the nature and quality of the whole discipline of close reading? Possibly. Does it say something about the nature and quality of my own skills as a reader/analyser of poetry? Probably.

Anyway, I landed instead on a couple of really old second hand books on my shelf from 20^th Century poetry’s original nepo baby, Robert Lowell. I know a bit about Lowell through my reading and teaching of Plath – I know he’s from a rich family, and that he taught Plath for a while in Boston, and that ‘Life Studies’ is a landmark in ‘confessional’ poetry, partly because he plundered details from personal correspondence with his wife, something which my old hero Elizabeth Bishop, a close friend of his, famously warned him against on moral grounds. Aside from Skunk Hour, this poem was the one that I remembered most clearly having read before.

This is also my first sonnet! I can’t believe I’ve got to L and haven’t done a sonnet yet! There’ll be other ones coming up fairly soon though as Edna St Vincent Millay and William Shakespeare, maybe even Alice Oswald, approach on the alphabetical horizon.

You can read and hear it here: To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage - The Poetry Hour

‘To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage’

“It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.”

—Schopenhauer

Lowell is doing something immediately odd. Everything is in quotation marks! The title, the epigraph, and the whole poem. What does this mean? Two things, I think. The first is that he wants us to consider the allusions, but actually I think the second is more interesting: the immediate effect of all these quotation marks is that they put the poem at arm’s length from the writer. ‘These are not my words’, he seems to be saying: ‘here are three different voices, none of which are my own’. Which is interesting given the ethical wrangling we know that he underwent while writing these very personal poems about his relationship. Where is he in this poem, and since he *is* the author and can’t make himself disappear entirely, what’s the effect of this kind of filtering? I’m not sure I’m going to be able to answer that, but we’ll see.

Back to the allusions – the title is from the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale”, where she introduces her story by claiming that even though she isn’t as well-read or well-educated as the other pilgrims, she is able to speak from her own experiences about the ‘woe that is in marriage’. So the title is an immediate claim to authenticity – this poetry is coming from experience – very Confessional, I guess. We also have Lowell referring to another example of a male writer (Chaucer) writing about relationships with men from a female perspective, which Lowell himself is going to do in this poem.

The Schopenhauer quote, I’m less confident with. I don’t know his work at all, having never studied Philosophy. So I haven’t read around the context of this quotation, but in isolation it seems to be making a claim about progress? Future generations are created out of the strong feelings of current generations, which are intense but short-lived? I’ve uglified it there but in what sense is this true? It it about individuals and relationships, literally a comment on procreation? Or is it about a culture that is constantly self-seeding but in a way that doesn’t seem fully planned or in control of itself? Perhaps it’s also saying, from our current perspective, that the short-lived moments of passion that we experience can be significant in that they can create legacy?

“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.

It’s a lovely, rich, sensory opening to the sonnet here. After the allusion to ‘woe’ in the title, the first two lines feel oddly hopeful – the heat of the night, the ‘us’ in the bedroom, the blossoming of the magnolia. Ideal conditions, possibly, for the momentary passions that Schopenhauer told us will lead to the creation of future generations. So where’s the ‘woe that is in marriage’? Oh, here it is:

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

That escalated quite quickly. Away from the sordid subject matter for a moment – that couplet ‘My hopped up husband drops his home disputes/and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes’ is really good, isn’t it? So perfectly of its time and place in late-50s America in terms of the vocabulary and attitude, but also rhythmically spot-on iambic pentameter. Lowell’s playing with the sonnet here – obviously they don’t typically appear in rhyming couplets, and the first two lines of this one, as well as that last one about the screwball, have been more like hexameter (six beats). So this is a kind of loose broken Modernist sonnet, then.

I guess it’s a modern, broken sonnet because the love affair is modern and broken, too. It’s a portrait of a dangerous man, possibly out of control with drink, drugs and lust – but interestingly, not so out of control, surmises the speaker, that his potential murder of her might allow him to set himself straight, assuming that ‘take the pledge’ to mean swearing off alcohol. It’s a bleak, dark thought, and if we’ve been asking ‘where is Lowell’ earlier, then maybe this use of the wife’s voice is a way to confront from the outside some desires and fears about a capacity for out of control violence.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It’s the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.

I like the use of ellipses here, which again allows Lowell to deviate from the normal rhythmical uniformity of the sonnet and render this more speech-like and fragmentary. Again, if we think about what sort of expectations a sonnet might set up, it’s interesting to consider how this is confounding them. Usually either Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets would be split up into units of meaning and we would find palpable changes between those units – so in a Shakespearean sonnet, it would usually be three quatrains (4 line stanzas) and a couplet, whereas in Petrarch it would be an octet and a sestet. These sections are usually indicated not just in terms of units of meaning but also through the rhyme scheme, usually abab or abba. But because of the rhyming couplets here, we don’t get that highly regimented change in thought. Instead even as we reach lines 7-10 we’re remaining on the same one subject – the man, and the monotony of his lust, his drunkenness, his dangerousness.

What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.”

So I guess the change I was talking about before was the expectation of a ‘volta’ – at least one moment in a sonnet, usually around line 9, where the ideas being established in the first part are looked at anew in the second part. And I think we do have this here – how do we explain the wife’s actions of ‘tying ten dollars and his car key to my thigh’ in light of her previous fears of violence and even murder? Is this an image of her enticing him back into the marriage bed, maybe to try and recoup some of the hopeful sensuality from the opening lines? Or does she *want* him to go out and leave her, knowing that his lust will draw him to her thigh and thus the car key and money, *distracting* him from sex with her?

And then that final image – “gored” is an awful, brutal, graphic verb for sex, and it’s slightly unclear who is being gored - if it’s her, it’s a crude and violent image of penetration in keeping with the violence of the rest of the poem, but actually I think the syntax is leading us to the image that *he* is the one that has been gored – “the climacteric of his want” has immobilised and injured him, and that image of him ‘stalling’ suggests a kind of impotence. “Climacteric” is a really unusual word here, and it’s one we’ve encountered before with Jo Bratten’s collection title for the letter B. Like Bratten, I think Lowell, too, is playing on the double meaning of that word – it means both a cataclysmic event in general, and also a specific biological process signalling a decline in fertility. This is what has ‘gored’ the husband – and perhaps this links us back to the Schopenhauer epigraph, where the opportunity for *meaningful* and *productive* climax has been lost, thanks to the husband’s drunken selfishness?

The image I guess, is both of them, in their mutual contempt, wanting on some level to return to marital sensuality while at the same time being disgusted and unable to. Again, if this is a Confessional poem, and we’re looking for Lowell, it’s an astonishing admission of his own weakness and unpleasantness. As with all of the Confessionals, it’s important to tread a fine line between biography and art, but there is the sense here of some serious internal darkness being explored, either in the self or in heterosexual masculinity generally.

Here's the poem again: To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage - The Poetry Hour

In the comments:

What was that Schopenhauer epigraph doing?

How did you interpret the wife’s actions with the car keys and money?