Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence by Jane Hedley

Author:Jane Hedley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4 Talking Transatlantic in The Dolphin

“Ah, love let us be true / To one another!” Lowell used these lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach ” as an epigraph for “The Mills of the Kavanaughs ” in 1951. In “Summer Tides ,” the last poem he finished before his death in 1977, he recalls Arnold’s poem once again in order to double down on the bleakness of its apostrophe to a beloved spouse. “Summer Tides” is set in Maine, where he was spending the summer with Elizabeth Hardwick, but his failed marriage to Caroline Blackwood is its preoccupation, and she is its addressee. “Tonight,” he says to her,  I watch the incoming moon swim

  under three agate veins of cloud,

  casting crisps of false silver-plate

  to the thirsty granite fringe of the shore.

  …

  I cannot go down to the sea.

  After so much logical interrogation

  I can do nothing that matters.

    (Collected Poems, 853: lines 2–5, 22–24)

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