Trying to Say What Happened

By Paul Gray

DAY BY DAY by Robert Lowell; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 138 pages; $8.95

On first reading, this new chapter in what Poet Robert Lowell has called "my verse autobiography" seems anticlimactic, a retelling of what took place after the curtain dropped. For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both published in 1973, took Lowell through the termination of his second marriage and the beginning of his third. The poetry in those two paired volumes was only infrequently up to Lowell's best, but the sustained drama of the situation--and the poet's vivid evocations of both anguish and exhilaration--provided enough momentum to carry even weak poems along.

Day by Day, as its title forthrightly suggests, deals not with major traumas but with quotidian coping--with domestic routines and alarms, intrusive memories, new marital discord, children, weather, newspapers.

Lowell has tuned his verse to the fits and starts that form his subject. Gone are the unrhymed sonnets that filled his last three books. Lines are now cut short, frequently reaching only five or six syllables. Whole poems appear to have been cut in half, from top to bottom, with only the left side remaining:

In noonday light,

the cars are tin, stereotype and bright,

a farce

of their former selves at night--

invisible as exhaust,

personal as animals.

In such edgy, close-cropped passages, Lowell denies himself most of the strongest weapons in his arsenal: the lushness of language and images that once re-created New England cemeteries and seacoasts, an ear unmatched among his contemporaries for the off-rhythms that can be made to rattle in the sonorities of a line of blank verse.

This stripping down of both matter and manner may confuse or offend some of Lowell's admirers. But beyond the specific subjects of individual poems, the process of reduction is what Day by Day is about. This is a departure for Lowell, and the reasoning behind it is autobiographical. In his confessional poems, Lowell has always been acutely conscious of his years: they defined him historically, located precisely the jumping-off place for his memories and served as a shorthand index for the variety of personal experience he was likely to undergo.

The new poems take Lowell from age 56 to 60 and announce, explicitly or otherwise, a new regimen:

Now that I am three parts iced-over,

I see the rose glow in my heater.

In moments of warmth, I see

the beauty who made summer

Long Island tropical.

From the nineties to Nixon

the same girl, the same bust..

The time for a profligate assimilation of the world is past or passing. It is now time to begin refining the experiences that life has provided. Had he chosen another line of work, Lowell implies, he might be faced with an involuntary retreat:

What was is...since 1930;

the boys in my old gang

are senior partners. They start up

bald like baby birds

to embrace retirement.

For the poet, retirement can only be self-induced. Lowell chooses a different road: "Why not say what happened?"

Considered at any length, of course, this task becomes impossible. What happened recedes into the vapors of personal impressions, and those fade further into memory and self-deception. Hence Lowell's formidable intellectual powers are here expressed tentatively, as if truth were a scurrying creature to be captured only briefly in a flash of light. Some of his terse epigrams both work and sing: "Ants are amazing but not exemplary;/ their beehive hurry excludes romance." Others simply limp by as paradox: "A false calm is the best calm," "If you keep cutting your losses,/ you have no loss to cut."

The slackness of such thoughts is largely ameliorated by the pleasure of watching Lowell's mind arrive at and then pass by them. Searching for conclusions, he offers few and insists on none. His deference to both the subject and the reader creates a mellowness that was largely lacking in earlier books. He is even humorous on occasion. In an affectionate poem addressed to the late John Berryman, Lowell admits: "I used to want to live/ to avoid your elegy." He turns out a witty quatrain worthy of the late Auden:

If I had a dream of hell

it would be packing up a house

with demons eternally asking

thought-provoking questions.

The dominant tone of the book, though, is elegiac. The voice is that of a poet who is coming to view himself as survivor rather than inheritor: "Being old in good times is worse/ than being young in the worst." He notes in passing the death of elders: "This year killed/ Pound, Wilson, Auden.../ promise has lost its bloom." In Ulysses and Circe, Lowell achieves a Tennysonian melancholy in depicting the aging Greek hero:

Young,

he made strategic choices;

in middle age he accepts

his unlikely life to come;

he will die like others as the gods will,

drowning his last crew

in uncharted ocean,

seeking the unpeopled world beyond the sun,

lost in the uproarious rudeness of a great wind.

The expansive music of these last two lines is atypical of the basic asceticism of Day by Day. Some of the pieces collected here are so slight that they would attract little notice if Lowell had not written them. But he did, and his unique genius and lasting accomplishments have earned him a lien on public attention. These poems--spare, often jarring to the ear, some times even prosaic--insist on a hearing. They are minor chords performed by a major artist.

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