Classic Love Poems
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Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was an American poet and essayist who wrote hundreds of intricate and tightly patterned poems incorporating traditional meter and rhyme. In 1946, he was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His volume, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947. By the time he published his masterpiece, Life Studies (1959), a collection of poems that forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, he was widely regarded as the best American poet of his generation. In 1974, he won another Pulitzer Prize for The Dolphin, which includes poems about his marriage to Caroline Blackwood and their life in England.
“The Kiss”
by Gustave Klimt, 1907-08
“Girl in Bed, Lady Caroline Blackwood”
by Lucien Freud, 1952
Dolphin
(written for his wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood)
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
Man and Wife
Listen to a reading of this poem below
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive . . . Oh my petite,
clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
on “Lowell, Robert”
