Robert Lowell Quotes

Age is our reconciliation with dullness.

Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, It’s the light of the oncoming train.

My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the heart, chocolates, cherries, hairshirts, pinks and glass— when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.

Life is too short to silver over this tarnish. The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands, have no hand for trigger-fine distinctions, their myopia makes all error mortal.

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone.

O that the spirit could remain tinged but untarnished by its strain!

Yours the lawlessness of something simple that has lost its law.

The elect, the elected…they come here bright as dimes, and die dishevelled and soft.

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.

The man is killing time—there’s nothing else.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat.

I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile.

I keep no rank nor station. Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell.

They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news of IS, the whited monster.

Let there pass A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze Is infinite, eternal: this is death. To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.