A fragment from Robert Lowell

Christ, let me die at night
with a semblance of my senses,
like the full moon that fails.

I'll never forget watching a visibly shaken Joseph Brodsky, who was a good friend of Robert Lowell's, read these lines during the poet's funeral at the Church of the Advent in Boston in September 1977.

This fragment was found among the papers Lowell left at his home in Britain when he departed from there earlier in the month, bound for the United States. On September 12 he died of heart failure in a taxi on the way from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. Of course, we were struck by Lowell's uncanny prophesy, but we were also moved by the fact that these lines, some of the last he wrote, had the same startling clarity as the poems in his final book, Day by Day, published the year before his death.

In the decades since then, Lowell's work--especially his collection, For the Union Dead--has continued to inspire our poets who want to probe the full range of American life--our public, or political lives, as well as our most personal experiences.

The photograph above of Lowell and his wife, Caroline Blackwood, was taken by Walker Evans in 1973. The portrait of Lowell below was taken by Evans at Milgate House, the couple's home in Kent.

• AUDIO: Lowell recordings from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room
• VIDEO: Lowell program in the "Voices & Visions" series
• Frederick Seidel's 1961 interview with Lowell for Paris Review
• Article about Lowell from American National Biography
• Helen Vendler on a new Lowell biography
• "Robert Lowell in a New Century", edited by Thomas Austenfeld
  
• Lowell's early autobiographical notes
  

Lowell in his days as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress (1947-48)

"Love after love"

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

I have been reading Derek Walcott for many years, but this still startled me with its wisdom and eloquence. It's clearly a poem that had to lived before it could be put into words. If we can only take Walcott's advice, each of us can have the full life that only self-acceptance allows.

• VIDEO: Walcott interviewed in Toronto in 2010
• AUDIO: The poet reading at Harvard in 1981
• AUDIO: Four poems from the Poetry Archive - London
• Biographical sketch of Walcott from the Poetry Foundation

"Next Day"

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water--
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school.

My husband away at work--I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything. I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

Is poetry still relevant today? If you ask me, all it takes is one poem like this one to make its case. In "Next day," a Kennedy-era woman reveals her deepest wishes and fears--those she barely admits to herself. I first read this nearly 40 years ago, and it still knocks me for a loop. No wonder Robert Lowell called Jarrell "the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation".

• Randall Jarrell reads "Next day"
• Biographical profile of Jarrell from the Poetry Foundation
• Robert Lowell on Jarrell

"The Snakes of September"

Stanley Kunitz

All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in the garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) is one of the essential American poets--a writer who extended the traditions of poetry in English that go back to Chaucer and Shakespeare while being utterly American and fully contemporary. He also exercised broad influence as a teacher, because he mentored many of the best modern U.S. poets.

Kunitz was still writing in his 90s, and the poems of his last years--this is one of them--have an extraordinary, concentrated beauty.

• Stanley Kunitz reads Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"

• Kunitz in Provincetown
  

• Kunitz on poetry and life

• Kunitz reads "The Layers"

• More poems by Stanley Kunitz