AFTER THE BURIAL1

YES, faith is a goodly anchor;
When skies are sweet as a psalm,
At the bows it lolls so stalwart,

In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm.

And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its iron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory,
One broken plank of the Past,

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1 A threefold sorrow has here found for itself a single expression. Part of the poem was written in 1850, after the death of Lowell's third daughter, Rose, only six months and a half old. I shall never forget,' he said at this time, the feeling I had when little Blanche's coffin was brought into the house. It was refreshed again lately. But for Rose I would have no funeral.. She was a lovely child - we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful-fair, with large dark-gray eyes and fine features... Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.' There follow, in Lowell's letter, six stanzas of this poem, in an earlier form. Into it is interwoven the memory of his oldest child, Blanche, especially perhaps in the last stanza. 'After Blanche was buried' says Scudder in his Life of Lowell, her father took her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his chamber. There they stayed till his own death.' But it was the death of Lowell's wife that gave to the poem its real intensity. The second to fourth stanzas, and the seventh to twelfth, were written in a mood which made Lowell say later: Something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. I hope you may never have reason to like "After the Burial" better than you do.'

The same interweaving is found in Under the Willows,' of which Lowell says: Something more than half of it was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, would come in against my will.'

Lowell said of this poem later, 'A living verse can only be made of a living experience and that our own. One of my most personal poems, "After the Burial," has roused strange echoes in men who assured me they were generally insensible to poetry. After all, the only stuff a solitary man has to spin is himself.' (The extracts from Lowell's Letters are quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! I haunt the pine-dark solitudes,

With soft brown silence carpeted, And plot to snare thee in the woods:

Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled! I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; 10 All Nature with thy parting thrills, Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips Where thou has dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot,

And through my frame strange raptures

shoot;

All of thee but thyself I grasp;
I seem to fold thy luring shape,
vague air to my bosom clasp,
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape!

And

One mask and then another drops,
And thou art secret as before:

Sometimes with flooded ear I list,
And hear thee, wondrous organist,
From mighty continental stops
A thunder of new music pour;
Through pipes of earth and air and stone
Thy inspiration deep is blown;

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Through mountains, forests, open downs,
Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns,
Thy gathering fugue goes rolling on
From Maine to utmost Oregon;
The factory-wheels in cadence hum,
From brawling parties concords come;
All this I hear, or seem to hear,
But when, enchanted, I draw near
To mate with words the various theme,
Life seems a whiff of kitchen steam,
History an organ-grinder's thrum,

For thou hast slipt from it and me
And all thine organ-pipes left dumb,
Most mutable Perversity!

Not weary yet, I still must seek,

And hope for luck next day, next week;

I track thee over carpets deep
To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep;
Across the sand of bar-room floors
'Mid the stale reek of boosing boors;
Where browse the hay-field's fragrant
heats,

Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats;
I dog thee through the market's throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues
Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer,
Curtsy their farewells to the town,
O'er the curved distance lessening down,
I follow allwhere for thy sake,

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Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'ertake,
Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies,
Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise; 90
But thou another shape hast donned,
And lurest still just, just beyond!

But here a voice, I know not whence,
Thrills clearly through my inward sense,
Saying: See where she sits at home
While thou in search of her dost roam!
All summer long her ancient wheel
Whirls humming by the open door,
Or, when the hickory's social zeal

Sets the wide chimney in a roar,
Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth,
It modulates the household mirth
With that sweet serious undertone
Of duty, music all her own;
Still as of old she sits and spins
Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins;

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130

'Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost,
Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait.
The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains;
With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands.
Make thyself free of Manhood's guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build;
The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain;
Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old; 140
From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,
Be something better than thy verse;
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews,
Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow
From farthest stars to grass-blades low, 150
And find the Listener's science still
Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!'

WHEN wise Minerva still was young And just the least romantic,

MASACCIO

IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL

He came to Florence long ago,

And painted here these walls, that shone

Soon after from Jove's head she flung That preternatural antic,

'T is said, to keep from idleness Or flirting, those twin curses,

She spent her leisure, more or less,

In writing po, no, verses.

Zeus snored, o'er startled Greece there flew

The many-volumed thunder.
Some augurs counted nine, some, ten;
Some said 't was war, some, famine,
And all, that other-minded men
Would get a precious —

Proud Pallas sighed, 'It will not do;
Against the Muse I've sinned, oh!'
And her torn rhymes sent flying through
Olympus's back window.

Then, packing up a peplus clean,

She took the shortest path thence, And opened, with a mind serene,

A Sunday-school in Athens.

The verses? Some in ocean swilled,
Killed every fish that bit to 'em;
Some Galen caught, and, when distilled,
Found morphine the residuum;
But some that rotted on the earth
Sprang up again in copies,

And gave two strong narcotics birth,
Didactic verse and poppies.

Years after, when a poet asked
The Goddess's opinion,

As one whose soul its wings had tasked
In Art's clear-aired dominion,
'Discriminate,' she said, 'betimes;
The Muse is unforgiving;

Put all your beauty in your rhymes,
Your morals in your living.'

THE DEAD HOUSE 2

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70

80

1857. 1

HERE once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.

1 In the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, of which Lowell was editor.

2 I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with Sacred to the memory of a HOME' on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it. (Lowell's Letters, vol. i, pp. 283, 284. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

For the first form of the poem, see Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, pp. 435-437.