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Robert Lowell Quotes
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Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,
Robert Lowell
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The line must terminate.
Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetime knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.
Robert Lowell
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If I could go through it all again, the slender iron rungs of growing up, I would be as young as any, a child lost in unreality and loud music.
Robert Lowell
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Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.
Robert Lowell
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When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Robert Lowell
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I saw the sky descending, black and white,
Not blue, on Boston.
Robert Lowell
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No one like one's mother and father ever lived.
Robert Lowell
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O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.
Robert Lowell
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Father, forgive me my injuries, as I forgive those I have injured! You never climbed Mount Sion, yet left dinosaur death-steps on the crust, where I must walk.
Robert Lowell
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Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve.
Robert Lowell
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I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn.
Robert Lowell
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I doodle handlebar
moustaches on the last Russian Czar.
Robert Lowell
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This is death.
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.
Robert Lowell
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These are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.
Robert Lowell
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Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart, Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen's choir I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud Flies from his hunching wings and beak—my heart, The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.
Robert Lowell
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I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.
Robert Lowell
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Folly comes from something –
the present, yes,
we are in it,
it's the infection
of things gone.
Robert Lowell
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Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war.
Robert Lowell
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We are old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell
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It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am...
if I am.
Robert Lowell
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We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Robert Lowell
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I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
Robert Lowell
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On Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling.
Robert Lowell
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Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an elephant.
Robert Lowell
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Robert Lowell
Creative Commons
Born:
March 1, 1917
Died:
September 12, 1977
(aged 60)
Bio:
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry.
Known for:
Life Studies (1959)
For the Union Dead (1964)
Lord Weary's Castle (1946)
Collected Poems
Most used words:
black
heart
father
light
air
small
blow
net
death
hear
built
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