Robert Lowell: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

observation, for natural—if not neutral—speech rhythms, and for some sparing exercise of the ironic intelligence . He had begun to grope towards the idea of himself as a“modern” poet, and in 1936 one way of being modern was to play it safe. This typical poem from the 1936 summer is possibly a reworking of the poem he showed to Anne Dick:
    I pulled up anchor well after mid-day
    Swishing the prongs back and forth in the water
    To shake off the mud:
    Washed the entrails and fish scales
    From my fingers
    And rowed thru the lily pads to shore
    My rods, a waving tuft of grass
    In the bow,
    Little perch with white-holes
    Between their back-fins
    Flapping against the sides of the bait-pail
    Cool water, loggy faded fish
    Prospect of picnic lunch ahead
    The shadow of tall trees above me. 11
    And a prose piece called “Grass Stroke,” which seems to date from this year—it is headed “Robert T. S. Lowell, Lowell A.41, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.”—has a sharp, surrealistic power; its transformations issue from feverishly intent scrutiny—if you look hard enough, and fiercely enough, it seems to say, you might injure your brain, but you will be rewarded by strange visions and elisions:
    Sometimes, when we are in disorder, every pinprick and scraping blade of grass magnifies. A pebble rolls into the Rock of Gibraltar. I got a sunstroke regarding the gardener mow the lawn. He dumped matted green grass into a canvas bag and emptied the bag into a rut pond behind a clump of shrubbery. People had emptied ashes into the pond; which otherwise might have been wild and unsullied with turtles flopping from rotten logs. I watched him dunp grass on the surface where there ought to have been frogs. I smelled the odor of dried verdure in my sleep; tons of it, wet and lifeless, floating and stifling. At morning the grass tide rose up gruesome.
    The sea lay grass green and ever so serene. Sharks’ fins ripped the ripe slick. The fish rythmically approximated each others’ courses and crossed at intervals. The water was toothed with their tusks. Oil dripped from the tusks. Short cropped grass drooped over their round eyes. Whales spouted, and their flat tails flopped and towered, making me conscious of umbrageous trunks surrounding the sea; a Nether Worldor antideluvian scene; shimmer of shiners, floating logs and submerged shadows.
    The grass adjoining the garden house on a golf links was grisled, bleached to hay, and piled in heaps. As I handled it the grass came off in layers. The underneath was damp. Maggots crawled and crawled, searching after a putrifying rat, buried under grass. Fermentation and stagnation had set in. The grass was a sieve for their seething. They had bright colors; orange with black spots (bees fly in front of the blazing sun); grayish-white with pale gray spots on a soft sloat torso; sheeny brittle beetle shells, unbreakable with a sledge. And the maggots seethed and seethed, searching for the rats, with eyes that could not see in terrible grass smell.
    I perceived a golf ball, hidden among weathered boards, near-by the hay pile. The ball was imbedded in a rut and had perhaps hibernated out the winder frozen. Rubber wrapping was visible through a dent. The cover was discolored and already undergoing the process of return. The earth devours her offspring: I am observing the earth-process, a huge globe masticating a little ball. I am addressing the earth; I have been addressing the earth some time. Earth, I am able to momentarily retard your dinner. I have not time to wait until you have finished your meal. I have leisure because I have a pain in my head; but you are tortoise-paced beyond reason, only tortoises are numbered among the rapid. I could swallow your golf ball; or, if I were profound, I could place it in a glass case with crossed brassies and a little white card inscribed “ Preserved ”; or I could throw it into the rut pond behind the clump of shrubbery, where the gardener deposite mown