Robert Lowell : a man after my own heart, and with a most delicate ear for words. I could have loved mad Ezra more but for his fascist ways....
The scabrous old pianos at St Hilda's which inflicted their out-of-tune assaults on us morning and evening warmed me instantly to Great Aunt Sarah and her dummy piano:
My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
Up in the air
by the lakeview window in the billiards-room,
lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour,
my Great Aunt Sarah
was learning Samson and Delilah.
She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano,
with gauze curtains like a boudoir table,
accordionlike yet soundless.
It had been bought to spare the nerves
of my Grandmother,
tone-deaf, quick as a cricket,
now needing a fourth for “Auction,”
and casting a thirsty eye
on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix
from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics.
But I always loved the figure of Lowell himself struggling manfully with his madness and his pedigree:
Waking in the blue
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
All sorts of heroes and heroines of mine lived in and around Boston - Literary Map of Massachusetts
