Robert Lowell's Hands

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Notes

¹One Rabbinic commentator pointed out that since death was unknown beforehand, Cain cannot be charged with murder, only with homicide. The engraving was by Frank Parker, a friend of Lowell's from boyhood onward. His signature can be seen in the Lord Weary's Castle printing but not in The Collected Poems. My quotations from Lowell's poetry are drawn from his Collected Poems, with page references given parenthetically.

²The Collected Poems (1006) endnotes cite parallel passages in Mann and Lowell. On additional connections between the poem and the novella, the novella and Mann, and contrasts between Mann and Lowell in their responses to the firebombing of Lübeck and other German cities—Lübeck was the first—see Kearful 2007/8. Mann regretted but approved it; Lowell became a conscientious objector.

³See A. C. Grayling, 51–53.

⁴See also “I see it burn on my right hand” (649); “to kneel and wait upon you hand and foot” (653); “frail body of an athlete, her big hand” (655); “I wish I had your lovely letter in my hand” [this line comes from a presumed letter from Hardwick to Lowell that in quotation marks constitutes a quatorzain titled “Communication”] (663); “and grapple for the danger of your hand” (667); “I long to see / your face and hear your voice, and take your hand— ” (671); “with a razor in its hand” (674) [echoes the “each of us holds a locked razor” (184) ending of “Waking in the Blue” in Life Studies]; “you hold me in the hollow of your hand” (681); “Our love means giving the wheel / a shake that scatters spurs of displaced bone / in the heel of the driver's hand” (686); and “My hand / sleeps in the bosom of your sleeping hands” (687), which I will turn to shortly.

⁵On the motif of kind hands extended to a fallen comrade in World War I literature, notably poetry, see Santanu Das.

⁶The stanza, including the Medusa allusion and Arnoldian echoes, needs to be read in the context of the poem as a whole, the “Near the Ocean” five-poem sequence that it completes, and the volume Near the Ocean. On all this, see Axelrod (191–94). Axelrod finds the final stanza “completely beautiful, one of the supreme moments in American poetry. His bitter reverie done, Lowell forgives himself and his wife everything” (192).

⁷See Dillian Gordon. Jan van Eyck inscribed the painting “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434,” which led Gordon and others to infer that van Eyck indicates his presence as a witness to a marriage: “What is being shown is the actual marriage, the swearing of solemn vows” (64). But precise decodings of the painting are legion, and the painting itself is now more frequently known as “The Anolfini Double Portrait.”

⁸On the specific occasion that “Water” is based on, see Mariani's account of the day that Lowell and Bishop spent together in August 1948 in Stonington, on the Maine coast (166–68). Mariani comments: “The ideal union for him, he now came to believe, should have been between him and this woman. But the day would pass without his finding the courage to make his intentions clear” (167). Lowell was unmarried at the time. Mariani quotes an unnamed “close friend” of Bishop's: “She would joke and say that she never wanted to marry Cal but she would like to have had a child with him” (168). Cal, Lowell's nickname from schooldays, was pinned on him apparently as a combination Caligula/Caliban. The Lowell–Bishop correspondence is collected in Words in Air.