Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

“Cut off from the sight of God, modern man wanders about in his Land of Unlikeness, driven by greed and cruelty.”

– Jerome Mazzaro, commenting on Robert Lowell’s first poetry collection Land of Unlikeness

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was full of contradictions. His parents were both descendants of old and notable New England families, the Lowells and the Winslows, but the tension and unhappiness of his childhood made him reject his heritage. He spent two months living in a tent on the lawn of his friend and fellow poet Alan Tate’s family home when he left Harvard abruptly after a fight with his father, then went to Kenyon College in Ohio.

He converted to Catholicism, and married his first wife, fiction writer Jean Stafford. When Robert Lowell refused induction into the armed services, he spent five months in jail as a conscientious objector.

And through it all, he wrote. Land of Unlikeness was published in 1944 in a limited edition of two hundred and fifty copies by Harry Duncan at the Cummington Press. It was full of the fervor of a new religious convert, but made barely a ripple in the literary world.
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The Holy Innocents

Listen, the hay-bells tinkle as the cart
Wavers on rubber tires along the tar
And cindered ice below the burlap mill
And ale—wife run. The oxen drool and start
In wonder at the fenders of a car,
And blunder hugely up St. Peter’s hill.
These are the undefiled by woman–their
Sorrow is not the sorrow of this world:
King Herod shrieking vengeance at the curled
Up knees of Jesus choking in the air,

A king of speechless clods and infants. Still
The world out—Herods Herod; and the year,
The nineteen—hundred forty—fifth of grace,
Lumbers with losses up the clinkered hill
Of our purgation; and the oxen near
The worn foundations of their resting—place,
The holy manger where their bed is corn
And holly torn for Christmas. If they die,
As Jesus, in the harness, who will mourn?
Lamb of the shepherds, Child, how still you lie.

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