Robert Lowell and the Distance of God

The context
One of the major publishing events of the decade was the appearance, in 2003, and after a wait of some twenty-five years, of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems. For the first time it was possible to read his work as a whole, with adequate annotation. The experience of doing that revealed a number of aspects of his work, glimpsed in the earlier partial collections but now clear for the first time. One of these is the shape, over a lifetime, of his sense of God; and it is that that I shall explore, tentatively and with a recognition that there is much more to be said, in this short paper.

Lowell’s external religious history is pretty well known. Brought up in a loosely Episcopalian Boston family, he became a Roman Catholic in the spring of 1941 following his marriage the previous year to the Catholic novelist Jean Stafford. He was then just 24 years old. His conversion had much to do with his marriage but also something to do with his reaction from the New England tradition that was strong in the Lowell home. His mother was a Winslow, a descendant of the family that crossed on the Mayflower and produced one of the first governors of the Plymouth Colony. His father was a distant relation of famous Lowells, including the poet James Russell Lowell and the astronomer Percival Lowell. On both sides, Boston was in their blood. Lowell’s Catholicism distanced him explicitly from this quintessentially Protestant culture, just as his move to the South in the late 1930s distanced him from its intellectual
equivalent.
As a Catholic, Lowell was—to use his word—fierce. He wrote poetry of an explicitly, even
aggressively, Catholic kind; for him the world war was the consequence of humanity’s denial of the truth that the Church offered. He thought, at one point, of abandoning poetry and becoming a lay missioner to the more benightedly Protestant areas of the country. Intense moral objection to the indiscriminate bombing of German cities led him to become a conscientious objector and he was sentenced to a year in gaol. A manic-depressive throughout his life, his friends sometimes suspected him of religious mania. When, however, his marriage to Stafford broke down in the latter part of 1946, Lowell renounced his Catholicism, saying that “it had served its purpose.” Whether he meant that personally or from the perspective of his writing, is not clear. At any rate he ceased to regard himself as a Catholic and that period of his life was at an end.

This did not, however, end his religious history. In November 1955 he applied to rejoin the Episcopalian Church, and he was formally readmitted. His funeral in September 1977 was Episcopalian. From his poetry, the words of faith—hope, grace, the Word itself—never disappeared. Yet the tone is different. In place of the explicit, aggressive belief of the 1940s, the tone becomes elegiac, a lament for something that is drifting away.

This prompts certain questions: was this simply a sense of personal loss, Lowell looking back to a period of certainty that he could never recover? Or does Lowell discover more in his elegy for faith? The availability of the Collected Poems allows these questions to be asked, and—for the first time—perhaps answered.

Personal and cultural loss
There is no doubt that Lowell’s elegiac treatment of faith contains elements of personal and cultural nostalgia. His poetry, even to the end of his life, touches more than occasionally on his regret for the time when the structures and practices of belief were close and available. This was written in the last year of his life:

The Queen of Heaven, I miss her,
We were divorced. She never doubted
The divided, stricken soul
Could call her Maria,
And rob the devil with a word.
“Home” (1977).

The same sense of personal loss is there in a stanza from “Waking Early Sunday Morning”, published in 1967, where churchgoing seems to promise relief from the workings of his own mind, and he thinks of being “lost with the faithful at Church”, with the “new electric bells/clearly chiming, ‘Faith of our Fathers’”. The forms and habits of Catholicism left their trace, and he missed what they had once meant to him.

Elsewhere the regret is for the religious inheritance of New England, not Catholic but nevertheless firm in its creed and commitments, for the cultural world that had produced, in the eighteenth century, such a figure as Jonathan Edwards. Lowell’s attitude to Massachusetts religion was mixed—he often saw it as closed and tyrannical—but at the same time it stood as evidence of an age when the boundary between the world and faith was still open, when it was possible still to expect a regular transit across that border. He found this continuity in the very style of New England building. Here he is addressing his cousin Harriet Winslow, who had lent him her house in Castine, Maine:

This white Colonial frame house,
willed downward, Dear, from you to us,
still matters—the Americas’
best artifact produced en masse.
The founders’ faith was in decay,
and yet their building seems to say:
“Every time I take a breath,
my God you are the air I breathe.”

Yet such a time, if it ever really existed, had gone, however powerfully nostalgia might paint it. The poem goes on:

New England, everywhere I look,
old letters crumble from the Book,
China trade rubble, one more line
unravelling from the dark design
spun by God and Cotton Mather—
our bell età dell’oro, another
bright thing thinner than a cobweb,
caught in Calvinism’s ebb.
“Fourth of July in Maine” (1967).

Whatever Lowell felt about Cotton Mather and his Calvinistic “dark design”, the note of regret is
powerful. There had been at least an approximation to a golden age, when humanity and God had lived in some kind of communication, when faith (as he puts it elsewhere) “gave darkness some control.”

Perhaps more than any other, Lowell’s poem “Waking Early Sunday Morning” conveys this sense of loss and regret. The poem stands in a distant relationship to one by Wallace Stevens’, entitles simply “Sunday Morning”, in which a woman finally turns her back on Christianity because she is now persuaded that Christ is dead:

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, ‘The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’

Stevens’ poem is a bracing farewell to belief, a celebration of the world as the only place of human fulfilment. Lowell’s tone in “Waking Early” is gentler, more regretful, and less concerned to look for substitutes. His world is still filled with the debris of past faith, and as he looks across the small Maine town God’s withdrawal still seems a kind of presence:

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

The belatedness of faith
So much expresses a familiar twentieth-century position: that of someone who, however regretfully, sees faith as born away on the tide of history, as the reality of an earlier age no longer accessible. Such a view makes the historicity of faith absolute and irreversible; there is no way of separating faith from its historical mediation, of rising above the particular circumstances of an age that has closed it to us. Within this perspective God himself becomes a victim of history; alive and necessary in one age, he becomes empty and dead in another.

This view has wide currency in contemporary secular society, and it is certainly part of Lowell’s perspective. He did, as we shall see, take history with great seriousness; he did not believe that it was possible to step back into a different thought-world, however that may have tempted him as a young man. Yet a careful reading of his work suggests that something more interesting, and more theologically productive, was going on.

What more Lowell has to say is closely bound up with his view of history. In 1973 he published a volume of over seven hundred sonnets, entitled History, in which he follows the human course from the creation to IRA bombings in Belfast. Out of that long sequence a view of history emerges which firmly rejects the idea that any age has been privileged as far as faith is concerned. To imagine that previous centuries have somehow stood closer to God than we do is to make a mistake both about God and about history. This is well conveyed in one of the earliest of the sonnets, Our Fathers:

That cloud of witnesses has flown like nightdew
leaving a bundle of debts to the widow and orphan—
the virus crawling on its belly like a blot,
an inch an aeon; the tyrannosaur,
first carnivore to stand on his two feet,
the neanderthal, first anthropoid to laugh—
we lack staying power, though we will to live.
Abel learned this falling among the jellied
creepers and morning-glories of the saurian sunset.
But was there some shining, grasping hand to guide
me when I breathed through gills, and walked on fins
through Eden, plucking the law of retribution from the tree?
Was the snake in the garden, an agent provocateur?
Is the Lord increased by desolation?

Whether we take the “cloud of witnesses” to be the witnesses of God’s creation, or the witnesses of faith invoked by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Lowell’s point is that, throughout history, they were always already gone, “flown like nightdew” to leave behind an orphaned creation. It is in this state of abandonment that the entire history of life has taken place, and even Abel has known it as he falls at his brother’s hand. Yet rhetorically we appeal to God as “shining, grasping hand”, or at least as the devious hand behind the calculated introduction of evil, with the snake doing his work for him. But the real question is the last, in which Lowell brings together what history separates: the being of God and the desolation of time.

In such a view the moment of conjunction between God and his creation was always past; at whatever point you might stand in history, this is how it would always look. The human invocation of God always exists—to borrow a word from Harold Bloom—in belatedness, and this has nothing to do with the particular point in history at which you stand. Bloom argues that all major poets have the sense of having arrived too late on the scene; everything has already been done, so that all they can do is struggle against that everything, and in that way only is newness achieved.

For Lowell faith has the same sense of having arrived too late, of being exiled from an earlier moment when all might have been given. But just as for Bloom the “strong” poet is the one who struggles within belatedness, so for Lowell faith is precisely what happens in that moment of exile and exclusion which is, in reality, the whole of history.

Lowell’s clearest expression of this comes in a poem published in 1964, “Tenth Muse”. This
supernumerary muse is sloth, the spirit of belatedness, who comforts him that he has not grasped the moment as Moses did on the mountain, the moment of direct encounter when history was suspended. For what came out of that was worse than his own indolence—

Yes, yes, I ought to remember Moses
jogging down on his mule from the Mount
with the old law, the old mistake,
safe in his saddlebags, and chiselled
on the stones we cannot bear or break.

Possession, certainly, revelation exact their own price. Lowell, meanwhile, stays with his unopened letters, “waiting for an answer”, with the sense of “always reaching land too late”, envying those of ancient days like Lot who had God plainly before them. But that, on consideration, he does not believe:

But I suppose even God was born
too late to trust the old religion—
all those settings out
that never left the ground,
beginning in wisdom, dying in doubt.
“Tenth Muse” (1964).

God, too, is involved in this belatedness; the God that Moses brought down from the mountain was already of the past, condemned to the inevitable decay from wisdom into doubt. To invoke that God was always to invoke the past; he was, in that sense, always already dead.
Where does this leave faith? In one of his poems on Jonathan Edwards, Lowell locates faith explicitly in an age of belatedness:

Edward’s great millstone and rock
of hope has crumbled, but the square
white houses of his flock
stand in the open air,

out in the cold,
like sheep outside the fold.
Hope lives in doubt.
Faith is trying to do without

faith. In western Massachusetts,
I could almost feel the frontier
crack and disappear.
Edwards thought the world would end there.
“Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts” (1964).

Here in the New England theocracy the frontier between God and man was to be abolished; here the faithful would enter paradise. Yet its inhabitants are now exiles, outcasts in the cold, hoping but doubting that the shepherd will find them. They live where faith must always live: not in unmediated contact with God as a daily visitant to the dwellings of men, but in history, where the great bastions of religion—Edward’s Calvinism, Lowell’s Catholicism—are our bastions only; where faith finally understands that it has to be faith.

The wordless Word
Lowell’s radical historicising of faith is brutal, but less hopeless than that assumed in conventional secular discourse. Instead of distinguishing between ages in which faith was available and those in which it is not, Lowell places all of history on an equal footing; there are no privileged positions. To think at all of God, to risk the enterprise of faith, is always to stand in belatedness, to have the sense that the things that one tries to grasp have already drifted away on the current of time. We never coincide with the moment of faith, which is never simultaneous with our moment, not because we live in the wrong moment but because that is how moments are. To understand that is to begin to understand what faith and history involve.

It is in this way that Lowell thinks of the distance of God, a distance that is also an equidistance, the same for all moments in history. This is, in one sense, good news for faith; there are no ages of absolute distance, of disqualification. We do not live in a special age of deus absconditus, uniquely disadvantaged. But there is a price for this reassurance: for Lowell, God will always be remote, removed from the immediate, from our always belated consciousness of him. We shall always be, as far as God is concerned, what Paul was in relation to Christ, “one untimely born.”

So far it would seem that Lowell represents a kind of extreme, contentless fideism, but that is not, finally, the case. He is not restricted to a determined but empty faith that insists on itself in the absence of any object. How Lowell identifies the object of faith requires us to look again at the way in which faith realises itself historically, in creed and in proclamation. We have already seen Moses descending from the mountain with the enchaining tablets, unfulfillable but also unbreakable, what Lowell calls “the old mistake.” This is his model for how faith maintains itself in history: as verbal formulation or ritual practice. Faith, publicly and historically, has no other way to be itself. But to speak of God is already to relegate him to what is defined and so past, and this pastness has as its corollary our belatedness.

Is Lowell, then, simply making a familiar point about any positive account of faith or of God? Is he revealing a religious sensibility less Catholic than Quaker, suspicious of the betraying word? To an extent, this is true; his insistence on the belatedness of faith is in part an insistence on the distancing inseparable from language. But he is also saying something about the being of God, not just about the way in which we should or should not refer to that being. This becomes clear in a 1964 poem “Fourth of July in Maine”. He is spending the holiday in his cousin Harriet’s house with family and friends; the evening is cold and they are talking in front of a log fire:

… here in your converted barn,
we burn our hands a moment, borne
by energies that never tire
of piling fuel on the fire;
monologue that will not hear,
logic turning its deaf ear,
wild spirits and old sores in league
with inexhaustible fatigue.

Lowell has had enough of language and definition, is exhausted by it; and he looks back to a time before words when the Word lived in silence:

Far off that time of gentleness,
When man, still licensed to increase,
Unfallen and unmated, heard
Only the uncreated Word—
When God the Logos still had wit
To hide his bloody hands, and sit
In silence, while his peace was sung.
Then the universe was young.

What Lowell longs for here is a God-before-history, before proclamation, before even the wounds of crucifixion were displayed; a God of pure, silent presence. God is the Word but wordless, the creator but not an activist driving history and defined by that history. Though this “far off time” was never any nearer than it is now, it is briefly possible for him to conceive of God as other than a victim of history and of ourselves as other than the inheritors of a faith that, even in our believing, we know to be outworn.

Christ as eternal event
Yet even in this vision belatedness still makes itself felt: “far off that time of gentleness.” To
conceive of God apart from history leaves the gulf still open; we still find ourselves exiled from the paradigmatic moment of faith, the moment when the frontier between man and the Word is dissolved in peace. For Christianity, of course, the moment of that dissolution is the moment of Christ; and the culmination of Lowell’s agonising comes in those poems in which he reflects on Christ.

These poems are few; significantly, in the long chronological run of the sonnets that make up History Christ is absent, and the sequence jumps from Cleopatra to Caligula. Yet few though they are, they do take us closer to an understanding of the relationship between God and history, a relationship in which God is involved with time and yet not relegated to a mode of pastness. In these poems there is at least a glimpse of how the belatedness of faith may be overcome.

Around Christmas 1945 Lowell wrote what is probably the greatest nativity poem of the twentieth century, "The Holy Innocents”. The once-imprisoned conscientious objector faced a world ruined by its history: Europe wrecked, Japan scorched by the first atomic bombs. In all that he looked for the presence of God, for the point at which God and history might come together in the Incarnation. What he found is deeply ambiguous:

Listen, the hay-bells tinkle as the cart
Wavers on rubber tires along the tar
And cindered ice below the burlap mill
And ale-wife run. The oxen drool and start
In wonder at the fenders of a car,
And blunder hugely up St. Peter’s hill.
These are the undefiled by women—their
Sorrow is not the sorrow of this world:
King Herod shrieking vengeance at the curled
Up knees of Jesus choking in the air,

A king of speechless clods and infants. Still
The world out-Herods Herod; and the year,
The nineteen-hundred forty-fifth of grace,
Lumbers with loses up the clinkered hill
Of our purgation; and the oxen near
The worn foundations of their resting-place,
The holy manger where their bed is corn
And holly torn for Christmas. If they die,
As Jesus, in the harness, who will mourn?
Lamb of the shepherds, Child, how still you lie.

In the war-torn world the Word is speechless, silent but still present; the oxen, who are here the
representatives of Christ, are both victims and apart, sorrowing with a sorrow that the world does not understand. Their painful progress takes us to the manger where Christ is indeed to be found; but the last line shocks with the possibility that the child, the still centre of history, may be a still-birth.

Belatedness is still there; as we look at Christ in the manger, it is already too late, he is already dead. The crucifixion simply enacts what has already taken place. Those who stand closest to him are speechless. Yet obscurely, hidden in silence, God enters the world; and the price of that entry, worse perhaps in 1945 than ever before, makes it all the more momentous. Lowell’s poem makes the human birth of God an eternal event, and necessarily the crucifixion becomes an eternal event as well. The poem vivifies what has often been a pious cliché: Christ is still crucified in the torment of his world.

By making both Christ’s birth and death contemporary rather than distant Lowell moves from his usual sense of time and of history. The experience of belatedness depends on a linear sense of time: we come along at a later point, too late for what we looked for. But if the central events of faith can be thought of as standing in a constant relation to linear time, no closer to one moment of history than to another, then we cease to be belated in relation to them. It is impossible for us to arrive to late for an event that is happening now—and now—and now.

That something of this sort played a part in Lowell’s own life is suggested by a late poem, one that more than any other confirms the reality of faith in his later life. It is one of the History sonnets, written in the late 1960s, within a decade of his death, and the great hymn of death is invoked through its title, Dies Irae:

On this day of anger, when I am Satan’s,
forfeited to that childless sybarite—
Our God, he walks with me, he talks with me,
in sleep, in thunder, and in wind and weather;
he strips the wind and gravel from my words,
and speeds me naked on the single way. . . .
You who save those you must save free; you, whose
least anger makes my faith derelict,
you came from nothing to the earth for me,
my enemies are many, my friends few—
how often do you find me, God, and die?
Once our lord looked and saw the world was good—
in His hand, God has got us in His hand;
everything points to non-existence except existence.

Here belatedness is overcome, even in the tense-pattern of the words. The linearity of time is abrogated. The day of anger is not the last day, but now: “on this day of anger, when I am Satan’s.” God is not one who once walked in a garden, but who walks now, does everything in the present; even his coming and his dying are endlessly repeated, “how often do you find me , God, and die?” Belatedness rears its head in the word “once”, but it is immediately overwritten by presentness—“God has got us in his hand.” And the everything of history, which obscures and negates God, affirms him in its very negation.

Conclusion: a history of faith
In such moments it is clear that Lowell’s religious history did not become simply that—history—when he ceased to be a Catholic. Pained though he was by loss of what he had once known, by personal and cultural regret for a time when faith seemed simultaneous with the life of time, he was able to understand certain important things. One had to do with the way that faith exists within history and in particular within the inheritance of historical forms. He was able to see that it is of the nature of faith so located that its objects will always seem to elude its grasp, will always feel itself untimely born. But he was also able to understand that the events of faith can never be wholly historicised; that unlike other events we always stand at an equal distance from them, which is also an equal closeness to them. Our belatedness is overcome at the point at which those events penetrate our lives and our time becomes simultaneous with
their eternity.