Abstract
This chapter looks closely at Rita Dove’s and Robert Lowell’s different ways of exploiting the part-whole relation between the sequence and its constituent poems. In Thomas and Beulah, the lyric biography of a forty-year marriage, a larger national narrative is brought to bear as the horizon of a series of “apprehended moments,” chronologically sequenced from each partner’s perspective in turn. In For Lizzie and Harriet, a self-consciously aging husband wrestles in first person, in the present tense, with time as the medium of entropy.
But first come ye fayre houres which were begot
In Joves sweet paradice, of Day and Night,
Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot,
And al that ever in this world is fayre
Doe make and still repayre.
Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion”
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Notes
- 1.
Carson has not provided line numbers for these “tangos,” which vary in length from one to five pages; line lengths are elastic, with many lines consisting of just one word. I have marked where line breaks occur, but used page numbers for citation.
- 2.
Elegiac couplets were used in antiquity for a variety of subjects (Carson is a classicist). They consist of a hexameter line followed by a pentameter. According to Wikipedia (accessed 9/01/16), “each couplet usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.”
- 3.
Greek scansion is quantitative rather than stress-based, thereby bringing time to the fore a little more insistently than English meter does.
- 4.
- 5.
Dove told Steven Schneider in a 1989 interview that 1900, the birth year given in her Chronology for Thomas, is not the year her grandfather was born (Dove 2003, 66); thus other dates in the Chronology could also be off by a few years. Forty years is, however, the length of time they were married, and Dove’s grandmother did, like Beulah, outlive her husband.
- 6.
Time is , of course, the “remover” to whom Shakespeare refers in sonnet 116.
- 7.
In Post-Petrarchism, Roland Greene (1991) explains how Petrarch founded the genre of the Western lyric sequence by building the passage of time into both the individual poems (with their often complex “then-now” structures) and the sequence as such. In so doing Petrarch created, suggests Greene (51), “a type of work through which it means something to pass,” one that “in describing a virtual life, claims for itself a certain integral range of our lives as readers—exchanges vita for vita.”
- 8.
Cf. Dove (2003, 190), where those beads become “a series of epiphanies” in a 2002 interview with Earl Ingersoll.
- 9.
Beulah is reminiscing while she dusts about a young man with the French-sounding name “Maurice” who won her a goldfish at the county fair: “That,” she thinks “was years before / Father gave her up / with her name, years before / her name grew to mean / Promise, then / Desert-in-Peace” (Dove 1986, 53).
- 10.
In the Schneider interview, Dove recalls a letter from a student who “thought Thomas and Beulah didn’t like each other at all, that the marriage was very sad.” “I was absolutely amazed at that notion,” she says: “I remember that absolutely calm feeling that my grandparents had, a sense of belonging together” (Dove 1986, 71).
- 11.
Shoptaw’s discussion of Thomas and Beulah is the best treatment of this sequence to date, but I do not share his perception that the husband’s and wife’s lives “rarely intersect” (Shoptaw 1987, 336). “Their lives’ desires lie elsewhere” (ibid.), but this should not keep us from noticing that his role as breadwinner-husband and hers as homemaker-wife are the focus of most of the poems in each sequence. Thomas’s final conscious thought, as he endures a fatal heart attack, is for Beulah: “Thomas imagined / his wife as she awoke missing him, / cracking a window” (“Thomas at the Wheel,” 43).
- 12.
Lowell’s Collected Poems (which did not include Notebook) will be abbreviated CP from now on. An earlier version of this poem, published in Notebook with the title “Glass for Our Wedding Anniversary,” does not include this line.
- 13.
The one obvious exception to this is an exception that proves the rule: Beulah is ready to tell Thomas “listen: we were good, / though we never believed it,” only after he has died. In Lowell’s depiction of his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, on the other hand, conversation is the heart and soul of the marriage—a topic that will be taken up more fully in Chap. 6.
- 14.
The 1970 edition of Notebook does include a one-page list of dated events that figure in some of the poems, but the time-span of the entire list is from 1967 to 1970.
- 15.
The list of dated events Lowell provided as an appendix, far from supplying a chronology or time-line for the sequence, seems intended to gesture toward the political climate of the volume as a whole.
- 16.
The volume includes two “Twentieth Wedding Anniversary” poems, both set in Castine Maine where they were spending the summer. The second begins by invoking Philemon and Baucis: “To our 20th. We live, two trees; / sometimes the green crack soonest in this soil / of granite and clamshells” (CP, 631).
- 17.
Oddly enough, the subject of the poem from which these phrases are taken is the rescue of a turtle found on the road: “We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle / rush for water like rushing into marriage, / swimming in uncontaminated joy” (CP, 635). Given its unexpectedness in this context, the impression this simile creates is that Lowell’s nostalgia for the “courtship” phase of his marriage is never far beneath the surface of everyday life.
- 18.
Kay Redfield Jamison (2017) deplores the “lasting and negative” impact of Hamilton’s biography on Lowell’s reputation “as a poet and man.” She cites “many who knew Lowell best,” including Elizabeth Hardwick, as having agreed with Richard Tillinghast that Hamilton’s was “‘a damagingly wrong-headed and skewed picture’” of the man they “‘put up with, laughed about, became exasperated with, but always admired and deeply loved’” (Tillinghast, ctd. Jamison , 9–10). Mariani’s biography, Jamison avers, is “more human, more complex, more appreciative of both the man and his work—but it has been less influential” (ibid., 9).
- 19.
“And neither of us the wiser or kinder” is quoted from a Notebook sonnet (“Half a Century Gone, 2,” 258) that was not included in For Lizzie and Harriet.
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Hedley, J. (2018). Making Us See Time. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_4
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