Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century by Haralson Eric L

Author:Haralson, Eric L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

Written during Robert Lowell’s Roman Catholic period and published originally in The Partisan Review in 1945, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is the central poem of Lowell’s first major collection, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). It is ostensibly an elegy for Lowell’s cousin, “Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea,” that opens with the discovery of the body:

the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light

Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

He grappled at the net

With the coiled hurdling muscles of his thighs:

The corpse was bloodless, a blotch of reds and whites,

Its open, staring eyes

Were lustreless dead-lights

Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk

Heavy with sand.

Lowell harmonizes with Milton’s Lycidas, the most famous sea-death elegy and the formal model for the poem. The injunction “ask for no Orphean lute / To pluck life back” echoes Milton’s “Weep no more,” although Lowell’s imperative is decidedly more pessimistic, a refusal of consolation in the face of a final death. The focus is, rather, on a recognition of loss to which, as in Lycidas, nature responds sympathetically:

Whenever winds are moving and their breath

Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,

The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death

In these home waters.

While Lycidas is the poem’s conventional benefactor, Moby-Dick is its mythological one. When the body is returned to the sea, it sinks to “Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose / On Ahab’s void and forehead.” Lowell then asks Winslow, “can you hear / The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward?” Winslow is, like Ahab’s men, victim of a thirst for vengeance—a thirst Lowell attributed to the U.S. war effort in his public refusal of the draft three years before. The Navy cruises for “unconditional surrender” (Lowell, “To President Roosevelt”), as Ahab did for Moby-Dick. Realizing Melville’s suggestions of the whale’s divinity, Lowell’s whale is an incarnation of God, “IS, the whited monster.” Thus, in its quest, the United States contests God, as did Ahab. The United States trumps the moral order of the world with its own prerogatives, violating its own democratic valuation of national self-determination, as, in Moby-Dick, the Quakers counteracted in the whale hunt their refusal to bear arms or harm life, a point toward which Lowell launches the poem with his epigraph from Genesis (“Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea”).

Drawing together biblical, Miltonic, and Melvillian scripture, Lowell declares his lineage, one in which the authority of each member is compounded by that of the others to a power Lowell wields in indictment. He drafts recognized agents and modes of judgment into his service so that he may prophesy: “This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale”; “This is the end of running on the waves.” Lowell’s ascendency is clearest in section V, wherein the killing of the whale triggers Armageddon: “the whale’s viscera go and the roll / Of its corruption overruns this world” and “In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat / The bones cry for the blood of the white whale.” The section ends with the

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