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| The setting. A reading of the poem is here |
Waking in the Blue
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the ‘mentally ill.’)
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale’
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out ‘Bobbie,’
Porcellian ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig’
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
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.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Lowell, who came from a privileged New England background and studied at Harvard, started writing confessional poems in the mid-1950s; when this poem was published, in Life Studies in 1959, it was considered brave to "come out" about mental illness, even though he doesn't talk about the nature of the illness.
If there are references in the poem that are mystifying,
these notes give some insight. "B.U.", for instance, is Boston University, hardly as prestigious as Harvard.
Porcellian? an all-male social club at Harvard.
Why does this poem appear here today? As so often, it's the result of a coincidence - my happening to start reading the
catalogue to an exhibition called
The Written Image that I had intended to see yesterday, but got sidetracked from. (It's still on my list; read about the show
here and
here.)
In the exhibition catalogue
Robert Perkins presents 45 years of collaboration with poets, and he writes:
These experience [of frightening things, as a child] prepared me to accept an old and precious world full of contradiction as it was overflowing with
beauty.
Our age doesn’t welcome the introvert. For these reasons, when I discovered her, poetry meant the world to me. These men
and women seemed like fellow travelers, older, wiser, more acute observers, spinners of the most gossamer fabrics and emotions.
Instead of being woven into the fabric of our everyday life, I’ve noticed poetry is, for most people, something they turn
to on an ‘occasion’: a marriage, a death, even an illness. I discovered poetry again on Bowditch Hall, a maximum-security ward
for men at McLean Hospital [in Belmont, MA], the same ward referred to in Robert Lowell’s poem ‘Waking in the Blue.’ I was there a year (in 1968,
insurance paid for a full year) and the aide who is mentioned in Lowell’s poem as the B.U. sophomore was still there. He had a copy
of the poem in his wallet. He would pull it out and point to his mention, as proud as any parent showing off pictures of his child.
After reading that, it seemed essential to find
Waking in the Blue immediately.
And now I've been sidetracked from looking at the online catalogue by writing this blog post, not just finding a new poem but educating myself about it and its references, and finding out about Lowell and about Perkins. ("Life happens when you're making other plans", wot?)
On his
website Robert Perkins says of himself:
Born in Boston and classically educated at Milton Academy and Harvard University (AB 1974), he received an MFA from the Graduate Program at Bennington College in 2004. His true education began while spending his 19th year on Bowditch Hall, the men’s locked ward at McLean Hospital in Belmont MA. (Humpty Dumpty River). Although it did not initially appear so, the trauma of this experience was the key to his life.
Back to the serious stuff of my own Plan A, now.
