O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer.
_ Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’
The lines came back to me tonight after forty years. It was 1968 when I first read Lowell’s Near the Ocean. I was 25, the summers were hot, young women were still ‘girls’, the alliance of sex and grandeur not yet comic. I knew what those lines were about.
When I went to check the quotation the web offered up this:
Lowell’s decline begins shortly after his next volume, Near the Ocean, whose opening poem also contains the dated and sexist couplet ‘All life’s grandeur/ is something with a girl in summer’.
Tom Paulin, reviewing Lowell’s Collected Poems in the Guardian
and making certain sure, in the manner of the old Soviet Writers Union, to show that he knows who and what to denounce.
Here’s the complete stanza.
O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!
And the complete poem, the strange, strained, fitfully brilliant poem is here.