Poem of the week, plus an in-depth analysis

For you poetry readers, and even those of you who don't, here's a lovely poem, and a full-on exegesis of it, from The Sharp Side litblog.

BURIAL by Robert Lowell
(For ------------- )

Six or seven swallows drag the air,
their fast play of flight unbroken
as if called by a voice –
the flies become fewer about my head.

A longwinded wasp stumbles on me,
marauding, providing, as if about to sting –
patting, smelling me, caught
in the carnivorous harmony of nature.

The small girl has set a jagged chip
of sandstone on the grave of a crow,
chalked with white Gothic like a valentine:
“For Charlie who died last night.”

Your father died last month,
he is buried . . . not too deep to lie
alive like a feather
on the top of the mind.

It’s a simple looking poem but not one that yields its meanings easily. On the face of it the situation seems straightforward. The poet (or, if you like, the speaker) is outside, watching a child put a memorial on the grave of a pet bird. The sight triggers an association with the funeral of the child’s father the month before.

But what is going on in this poem? It starts with the description of a bunch of swallows flying through the air. But what does “drag the air” mean? I suppose it means “pull the air with them”. But what does that mean? It’s a windy day? Or does it mean “drag against the air”?

The swallows move as one, as if a voice is calling to them. The implication, perhaps, is that the swallows are departing from the poet’s vision. The speaker’s gaze then seems to fall to the space just above his head (I am assuming that the speaker is male, though the gender is never defined). Here, too, flying creatures are departing, but now they are not swallows (romantic, transcendent) but flies (unromantic, unhygienic and everyday). The poet, in short, attracts flies. But the flies are departing too.

Then the wasp arrives on the scene. It is “longwinded” because it’s droning on and on, as wasps do. It “stumbles” into the speaker. The verb is unexpected, because wasps don’t walk, they fly. But you know what Lowell means – flying insects like wasps do sometimes bump into you, like, say, a clumsy drunk. The wasp is “marauding”. This, too, is how wasps seem through human eyes – aggressive, predatory, dangerous. But that next word is a shock: “providing”. What does Lowell mean? Obviously not the familiar sense of “supplying”. Of the various dictionary definitions the only one that seems to fit is “taking precautionary measures”. The wasp is checking out the territory, fully prepared, ready to inject its poison. Then another unexpected word: “patting”. Meaning, I suppose, bumping into. The stanza’s five commas and a dash enact the jerky, broken movements of the wasp as it blunders around the speaker’s body. The wasp’s motions are predetermined by its biology: it is a creature of sensation and instinct, imprisoned “in the carnivorous harmony of nature.” Lowell turns upside down the commonplace quasi-Darwinian view of nature as one of bloody carnivorous aggression, insisting instead on the harmony of a world in which meat eaters feed on meat eaters.

The third stanza seems flat and prosaic after what has preceded it. It is a simple description of what the speaker has just witnessed: a small girl putting her own home-made memorial on the grave of a crow, which by implication was some sort of pet, named Charlie. Nothing further is explained, though at least two questions might be thought to arise from it. How do you make a wild bird like a crow a pet? What were the circumstances of the bird’s death?

Then comes the most difficult stanza of all. What is the meaning of the two and a half lines which follow the three dot ellipsis? Do they mean that the dead father IS alive like a feather on the top of the mind (whatever that means) or that he is NOT alive like a feather. If the first sense, then I would have expected a comma after “lie” at the end of the second line. This is, after all, a poem which makes full use of conventional syntax. But the absence of that comma suggests the second sense, implying that the deeper the dead father lies the more he becomes alive, and the shallower he lies the less alive he is.

Part of the meaning of the poem, it seems to me, is the deliberate withholding of meaning. The poem is specifically dedicated to someone but that person’s name is withheld. A reasonable assumption is that the missing name is that of the little girl. But an ellipsis in the middle of a sentence also signifies the withholding of words. So what is being withheld in “he is buried ... not too deep to lie”? Does the ellipsis signify the passage of time since the burial, or the speaker pausing to brood on the meaning of that death, or something else? And what about Charlie, the dead crow? There must be some sort of story attached to Charlie and the girl. But Lowell denies it to us and that denial indicates, I think, that he doesn’t want us to seek out that sort of meaning.

In their only note to this poem the editors of the Collected Poems supply a name for the dead father. I’m not sure that helps. It’s possible to guess who the child is if their identification is accurate and if you’ve read a biography of Lowell, but to start attaching names and biographical situations to this poem is, I think, to fail to grasp its artistry and meaning and to turn it into the equivalent of showbiz gossip. The subtlety of the poem is disfigured if we chain it to the people and situations in Robert Lowell’s life. The poem may have grown out of an actual moment in his life, but what he made out of it wasn’t self-advertising. In other words, he wasn’t writing a poem about himself but about the human condition.

It appears to be, until that last stanza, a very straightforward poem. But the more I read it the more mysterious and magical this poem seems to be. I think it’s about memory, and time, and bereavement, and mortality, and old age and childhood, and about earthly fleshly things, and transcendence. The different parts of this poem connect in all kinds of ways. The swallows, the flies, the wasp, the dead bird, the dead father, the feather in the mind – they invite the reader to re-assemble them and make sense of them. That the birds are swallows makes me think of the way graves are sometimes described as “swallowing” people. To be buried is to be swallowed up by the earth. And the buzzing wasp makes me think of “O death, where is thy sting?” from ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’ in ‘The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the church according to the Church of England’. And when I look it up I discover that this phrase occurs in the context of a section about how all the dead will be resurrected “at the last trump”, making them immortal: “then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin…” Swallow, wasp, grave – that triad is resonant with all kinds of linguistic, cultural and poetic associations in Lowell’s ‘Burial’.

What energizes the poem, I think, is its dialectic of two opposing movements. There are images of flight (the swallows, the flies, the wasp) and there is the downward pull of mortality (death, burial). They coalesce in the dead crow. The axis of this poem is death. We have the figure of the little girl, who has her whole life ahead of her and who is as yet innocent of understanding the awful impact of human mortality. And we have the figure of the speaker, who mournfully connects the child’s mimicry of the funeral of her father to a vision of life in its entirety. On the page, visually, the poem is a tower of words, layer after layer of language, with words about swallows at the top. The swallows, I think, partly signify art and the imagination, and particularly poetry. The “fast play of flight unbroken” is what we get in ‘Burial’ itself, as images and ideas fly to and fro. And ‘Burial’, too, is perhaps “called by a voice”. It might be a memory of the voice of the girl’s father, or it might be the memory of the speaker’s own father, or possibly even the memory of the cawing of the pet crow. And beneath those transcendent swallows lies the stuff of life itself: meat, mortality, human relationships, fathers, childhood, time, funerals, flies, bumbling wasps, love, Valentine’s Day cards.

And then those enigmatic last two lines:

alive like a feather
on the top of the mind.

But what is a feather on the top of the mind? A thought? A memory? Perhaps most immediately the memory of the dead father? But the dead father is NOT alive like a feather, if I read the last two and a half lines correctly. I suspect there may be two dead fathers here. There is the girl’s dead father. The girl seems to have forgotten him already and is concentrating her grief on a dead pet. Or perhaps, subliminally, she is re-enacting her father’s funeral. But perhaps the speaker is also thinking of his own dead father. There is a sense of life departing from the poet in this poem – the swallows move away (as if creative inspiration or motivation was departing), and even the flies dwindle in number. And it’s true, I think, that the older people get the more they start to review the course of their lives and retreat into the deep past, reliving their own childhood experiences and remembering their own dead parents. The little girl is too close to the death of her father to understand its impact; perhaps she will really only truly experience it when she is a lot older. By then he will lie ‘deep’ – not so much in the earth as in the past.

The feather is memory. But as an image of something which is very light, elegantly structured, and associated with flight and birds, the feather is also, perhaps, the poem itself. The feather floats free of the heavy weight of flesh it once was rooted in. Words free themselves from the dross of the artist’s worldly existence. The feather has a slender elegance. It is light, delicate, complex. It floats in the mind. It is what is left.

We are all meat. One day the swallows (the art we consume or the art we make) will fade. Even the flies will lose interest in us. And once we’re gone all that will remain will be other people’s memories of us, or perhaps, for a few, the art they made or the words they left behind.

There is one biographical aspect which does seem worth mentioning in connection with this poem. Shortly after the publication of Robert Lowell’s ‘Burial’ occurred Robert Lowell’s burial.