#torquatus

Yet the strength in Day by Day lies in its refusal to take refuge in, to rely upon, classic forms, in verse or in truism and consolation. "It's an illusion death or technique/ can wring the truth from us like water," "In the Ward" bleakly asserts; and it goes on to expel what we might imagine to be an earlier phase of Lowell' s art, when a tendency to bombast can be felt, at times, as an imposition of will upon the threatening formlessness of sorrow and fear. "What helpless paperishness,/ if vocation/ is only shouting what we will," the poem continues. These poems have incorporated damage, guilt, and psychic disintegration, and have won their shapes from them, not over them. Another bargain struck anew, and renewed, in Day by Day is the commerce between the personal and the impersonal. Such a transaction, in itself, is nothing new in Lowell, who by virtue of birthright and education always felt himself to be somehow heraldically related to the experience of the nation. But Day by Day accentuates both the vulnerable singularity of the "I" and the "I's" absorption into commu- nal pattern. Both recognitions occur in stark syntactic economy. The "I" questions itself in a poised repetition, a seesaw of doubt, in "To Mother": "It has taken me the time since you died/ to discover you are as human as I am. . ./ if I am." With equal clarity, the "I" in "Death of a Critic" affirms, "The age burns in me." When this book rises to majesty—and I believe it does—it is when the intensity of private experience has exerted such pressure upon poetic form that the "I" no longer subsists as a personal element at all, but contracts to diamantine hardness and generality. "Folly comes from something - /the present, yes,/ we are in it;/ it's the infection/ of things gone. . ." ("We Took Our Paradise").

These poems have rescued humility from their damages, and a directness which is prose's best gift to poetry. The book itself makes an offering of its brokenness, an art of its uglification. If we look for an ars poetica to describe this art of lucid and subtle crudity, an art of truth which apparently sacrifices much in the way of inherited lyric beauty, we have to look no further than "Thanks-Offering for Recovery," which presents a Brazilian ex voto head:

  It is all childcraft, especially

its shallow, chiseled ears,

crudely healed scars lumped out

to listen to itself, perhaps, not knowing

it was made to be given up.

I would take you to church,

if any church would take you. . .

This winter, I thought

I was created to be given away.

  In their lack of ornamentation, these lines may indeed seem to be crudely healed scars; but a second look ascertains the extraordinary image for self-consciousness in the carving' s ears "lumped out/ to listen to itself," and notes the elegance of the chiasm binding the paradox of giving and receiving in "I would take you to church,/ if any church would take you."

No one would want Robert Lowell ' s life, with its repetitive manic breakdowns, its family destructions, its incarcerations in jail and mad- houses (spaces that curiously resemble the patrician institutions of his class, the soccer courts and dormitories of prep school). But out of his turmoil, Lowell drew an art of excruciating insight into our violences past and present, private and public. Out of shared historical consciousness, he precipitated a poetry of solitude, and rediscovered, in his own way, the truth of Horace's Torquatus Ode, IV, 7:

  Non, Torquatus, genus, non te facundia, non te Restituet pietas.

  ("Torquatus, not your blue blood, not your eloquence, not your

piety will restore you to life." My translation.)