By Michael Brosnan
I made the classic mistake recently of using a rainy day to open a box of books I had packed up long ago. Some of the books dated back to my college days in the mid-1970s. Among them was Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle.
This was one of the first contemporary poetry books I had read in college — and, for better or worse, helped kickstart my own interest in writing poetry.
Over the years, I have read some of the commentary about Lowell. That he was bipolar. That he was difficult to live with and quick to abuse. But also that he was a beloved teacher and a groundbreaking poet who won the Pulitzer Prize twice — so worth paying attention to. Stanley Kunitz once wrote that Lowell’s Life Studies was the most influential poetry book since The Waste Land. I had also read commentary that described “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” as one of the great poems of its era — and high on the best-of list of American poems.
It got me curious. I opened Lord Weary’s Castle and began re-reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” in my cold, poorly lit, unfinished basement.
I first read this seven-part elegy in an undergraduate course on contemporary American poetry. The class was one of my favorites, but the truth is that so much of the poetry was over my head intellectually and emotionally. I only half understood what I was reading and relied on class discussions and the professor’s help to suss out any kind of meaning or cultural value from the poems. This was particularly true for Robert Lowell.
When reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” for the first time, I think I mostly felt excited by the idea of a poem so different from anything I had read. I also liked that it is set on Nantucket, which back then seemed like a wild and romantic place (with very little resemblance to the place it had been in the whaling days and to the privileged place it has become). I knew the poem focused on whales and whaling, on loss and death, suffering and war, and offered some kind of commentary on American life, but I could not articulate what exactly I was supposed to know and feel. The language felt intricate and dense, and Lowell’s need for literary references and for rhyme, slant or otherwise, made the reading difficult.
And now?
Now I understand the poem only somewhat better but feel its scaffolded grief more viscerally. In writing about losing his cousin Warren Winslow, who died when his naval destroyer accidentally exploded and sunk in New York Harbor during World War II, Lowell ranges widely to excavate the embedded, harshness of the human condition —in the long, violent history of whaling and in our ongoing warring days. What I think was harder for me to see back in the day — and what is clearer now — is the whole undertow of darkness in the American story. The poem crosses time and space, mixes literature and history with personal observations, to paint a harrowing portrait of American violence and suffering that contrasts so sharply with our national ideals, with what, as a child, I thought this nation embodied. The echoes of Lowell’s personal and public grief and his observations on the arc of violence still reverberate today.
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” starts with an epigraph — a truncated version of Genesis 1:26, that rather confusing notion that God wants us, as Lowell phrases it, to “have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.”
The intelligent way to respond to this Old Testament directive is in terms of stewardship, not dominance, not power and abuse. Right? After all, the Bible also encourages us to see all of nature as God’s creation and, thus, deserving of our respect. But, of course, stewardship is not something we excel at — and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is a reminder of ways we muck things up, retreat, then muck things up again. In Lowell’s poem, what we see, what we reflect on — or at least what I felt reading the poem in my basement — is the tangled result of too much dominance, too little heart. It’s the world of Ahah, not of Rachel Carson.
In its fashion, the poem wrestles with both the whaling history and the large question of human spirituality — especially how the two conflict. Can peace-loving Quakers really justify the slaughter of whales? That question aside, it must have been so painful for Nantucket families to wait and wait for young whalers to return or for any kind of news to reach the island. How could one think on the idea of the glory of God alongside the violence of whaling and the grief of losing sons and brothers and husbands while living out winter on a harsh, windblown island? We’re meant to make the connection with Moby-Dick, of course, and the story of The Essex in the form of The Pequod. But we’re also meant to reflect on the violence that ended Lowell’s cousin’s life (and millions more) through war.
Perhaps because I feel the dangers embedded in hubris and power today, my new reading of the poem left me reflecting on, not just Lowell’s artistry, but also on the question of why we — if, indeed, there is an actual “we” — keep getting so much wrong. Why dominance prevails over stewardship. Why power elbows out empathy. Why we can lay aside our own beliefs. Why the money men choke-chained the capitalist system can’t help but lead us to the cliff’s edge.
The first section of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” puts us out beyond the “brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,” an area off western Nantucket, where an unnamed naval fleet hauls up a dead body, then returns it to the sea with military honors and a multi-gun salute. This section is a slant reference, I’ve read, to both the death of Lowell’s cousin and to the sinking of the Irish “famine” ship, St. John, which wrecked off Cohasset in 1849. This shipwreck turned out to be one of the tragic events in the very tragic exodus from Ireland during The Great Famine. The storm that sunk the St. John killed more than 100 Irish refugees. It’s also worth nothing — since the poem highlights levels of human inhumanity — that an estimated 20 percent of the passengers on the St. John died in transit from disease and starvation, which was also true of other immigrant ships from Ireland. Around 20,000 Irish immigrants died in transit or in disembarkation centers during the famine.
I’ve read that Lowell drew this image of the dead body at sea from Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, which opens with our contrarian Concord sage down on the Cohasset shore witnessing the washing up of bodies from the wreck of the St. John.
I only mention this because I think the link to Irish suffering adds another level of complexity to Lowell’s poem and foreshadows the suffering of so many refugees and migrants seeking a new life in America and elsewhere today.
The second section of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” puts us on Nantucket during Lowell’s present time. Here he offers up the contrast of those who play at sea in their weekend sailboats with the serious and often deadly business of trying to make a living at sea. Lowell is grieving for his cousin whose body was never found. The actual Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, of course, is also full of the bones of thousands of Quaker islanders, many who also died at sea in pursuit of whales.
In this section, we’re offered a dense, complex picture of personal reflection and mourning, with one more reminder of Ahab and his mad quest to kill one particularly elusive and angry and now metaphoric whale. What interests me here is that Lowell imagines the Pequod’s dead sailors crying out for Moby-Dick, the hurt beast, as if they all knew that Ahab’s quest was mad and ill-advised, and yet they continued on obediently.
This question of complicity is haunting, then and now.
I do not mean for this to be a section-by-section explication of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” So I won’t go on in detail about the remainder of the poem. Generally, what follows are Lowell’s reflections on the violence at sea revolving around his feelings of loss for his cousin — all of it threaded to more general sense of suffering and the heavy load of our inhuman leanings. Also woven throughout are Lowell’s insights into the way spirituality is so often misaligned with human action. There’s a mysterious reference to a creature named “IS” in the poem. Besides being a pretty cool verb to personify, IS seems to embody the spirit of Moby-Dick and may have greater mystical powers of destruction. In other words, IS is a sublime force beyond our ability to fully comprehend.
In section VI, we briefly leave Nantucket for England — to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a site for annual pilgrimages. Given that pilgrimages are mainly about asking for intercessions, healing, and the renewal of faith, I think we’re to understand Lowell’s personal searching in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” in a larger, spiritual light. But in the end, we’re back on the New England shore again, where “the empty winds are creaking and the oak/ Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph.”
Sorrow for what cannot be recover is pure sorrow. There’s no relief. We’re meant to feel Lowell’s personal loss and sense of despair rumbling. In our own spiritual searching, we’ve created a God — or gods — we’ve always hoped would guide us. But here the winds are just winds. And our destructiveness rages on. We harm ourselves and our world. We can pray for some kind of deliverance, but what history tells us is that we need, more than anything, to deliver ourselves from the worst of our instinct and illusions.
The poem ends with the cryptic line: “The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.” I could try to explicate this line — say something about its allusion to the biblical flood and its aftermath. I could also try to connect it to the broader themes in Lord Weary’s Castle. But maybe it’s best for each of us to simply carry it around like a worry stone in our pockets and see if it can lead us toward some better chapter in our shared history.
Just so I’m not being opaque here, let me add this. When I re-read this poem, I cried quietly for the optimism I felt as a college student and young writer back in the 1970s. I cried for the failure of our long-spoken wish to end war, to find peace. And I cried for the cruelty and destructiveness and spiritual emptiness I feel we’re all witnessing today: the greed and authoritarian leanings of our national leaders, the abuse of refugees, the continuing environmental destruction, the willingness to use people for immoral ends, the belittling of efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion, the unchristian proclivities among too many Christians, the maddening labyrinth of bluster and lies, the turning away from the suffering of others and toward the sharp unmaking of democracies. Much of this recent turn of meanness rests on the actions of one man and his coterie. But I think it’s also fueled by our general inability to talk clearly about any of this with each other.
If there’s an argument for reading more poetry today, this might be it. We are standing on the edge of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” looking in. The sea and history are at our back. The stories of the dead reverberate. It would be best if we really took a good look around and agreed that something’s gotta give.