(no subject)

[ricardienne]

My grandfather liked Robert Lowell. One of my professors last semester studied with him -- the professor who reminded me of my grandfather. It's the old New England aristocracy, I suppose, they like to stick together. Steeped with the teabags of Homer and Virgil at Andover and Exeter, then off to Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth or Amherst. All that shared past and present and old-fashioned scholarly elitism.

I like this poem:

The Park Street Cemetery

In back of the Athenaeum, only
The dead are poorer. Here frayed
Cables wreathe the spreading obelisk,
And a clutter of Bible and weeping willos
Preserves the stern surnames: Adams,
Otis, Hancock, Mather, Revere;
Franklin's mother rests in hope.


Dusty leaves and the frizzled lilac
Liven this elder's garden with baroque
And prodigal embellishments; but the ground
Has settled in saecula saeculorum;
The dead cannot see Easter crowds
On Boston Common, or Beacon Hill
Where the Irish hold the Golden Dome.


What are Sam Adams or Cotton Mather?
The stocks and Paradises of the Puritan Dracos,
New World eschatologies
That fascinated like a Walpurgis Nacht,
And the Promised Land foreseen in Plymouth?
The graveyard's face is painted with facts
And filagreed swaths of forget-me-nots.