Poems
Life Studies (1959)
Beyond the Alps
(On the train from Rome to Paris. 1950, the year Pius XII2 defined
the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption)
Reading3 how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
in once again and Everest was still
unscaled, I watched our Paris Pullman lunge
mooning across the fallow Alpine snow.
O bella Roma! I saw our stewards go
Forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs.
Life changed to landscape. Much against my will,
I left the City of God4 where it belongs.
There the skirt-mad Mussolini5 unfurled
the eagle of Caesar. He was one of us
only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous
waste of our grandparents on their grand tours –
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,
while breezing on their trust funds through the world.
When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,
the crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
and listened. His electric razor purred,
his pet canary chirped on his right hand.
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
To Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
Angel-wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?
Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter’s brazen sandal.
The Duce’s6 lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.
God herded his people to the coup de grace –
the costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,
O Pius, through the monstruous human crush….
I thought of Ovid. For in Caesar’s eyes
that tomcat had the Number of the Beast,
and now where Turkey faces the red east,
and the twice-stormed Crimean spit, he cries:
“Rome asked for poets. At her beck and call,
came Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal7 ,
the black republicans who tore the tits
and bowels of the Mother Wolf8 to bits -
then psychopath and soldier waved the rod
of empire over Caesar’s salvaged bog...
Imperial Tiber, Oh my yellow dog,
black earth by the black Roman sea, I lie
with the boy-crazy daughter of the God,
Il Duce Augusto. I shall never die.â€
Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth.
Tired of the querulous hush-hush of the wheels,
the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth
lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels
on terra firma through the morning’s thigh -
each backward wasted Alp, a Parthenon ,
fire-branded socket of the Cyclops' eye ...
There are no tickets to that altitude,
once held by Hellas when the Goddess stood,
prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,
pure mind and murder at the scything prow -
Minerva the mis-carriage of the brain ...
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.
(Life Studies, 1959)
1Lowell rescues the title from a line belonging to a previous poem titled "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" (Lord Weary's Castle): "The elephants of Carthage hold those snows, / Turms (troops) of Numidian horse unsling their bows, / The flaming turkey-feathered arrows swarm / Beyond the Alps". We may consider that this poem begins the revolution in thought and style vis-a-vis his previous works. In "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid" dream and myth are intertwined within the poetic text as revelation. Spatial frame is decidedly puritan, and it works as an axis where it is possible to confront a religious puritan present against mythic pagan past (as, for instance, the funeral of Pallas). In this complex process it is again the search for selfhood that addresses the poetic path and rhythm: "Who am I, and why?" The epigraph is illustrative enough: "An old man in Concord forgets to go to morning service. He falls asleep, while reading Virgil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince" (Lowell 1946: 101). There is a fascinating intertextuality here as Lowell seems to coincide with the aesthetic project of the Aeneid. "Beyond the Alps" is a highly symbolic poem within the sequence, within Lowell's spiritual journey, and within his poetry in general terms.
2On March, 1939, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, became Pope ("Pius XII"). It is worth mentioning that in spring of that year, Hitler's army was occupying Checoslovaquia. Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of Mary's bodily assumption on the 1st of November, 1950.
3"Beyond the Alps" begins with an objective reference expressed by the lyric I concerning the news that he is reading in the newspaper while he is crossing the Alps by train. This focus shall be modulating with subtlety, while the process of reflection shifts to subjective references. Lowell used two key lines in two of his versions of this poem: "Life changed to landscape" (Life Studies, 1959), but "Man changed to landscape" (For the Union Dead, 1964). It is important to note that the train's movement is working symbolically for the speaker's inner journey. As pointed out above, this journey covers several regions of the self, and we must take into account that one of these levels concerns his own writing. It is a kind of purification and self-discovery, a process of reinvention through the poetic word for which this poem may be considered the threshold.
4Rome.
5It may be considered that Mussolini inherited Caesar's violent culture in the City of God (Rome). The eagle was a symbol for Imperial Rome.
6Mussolini.
7Lucan: Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, poet of the Silver Age, born c.39 AD at Cordoba, Spain, and died in year c.65 AD. Tacitus: Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Roman historian, born c.56 AD, died c.120 AD. Juvenal: Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Roman poet and satirist, born at Aquinum, Italy in c. 60 AD, and died in c.140 AD.
8Legend and symbol for the genesis of Rome: twin boys, Romulus and Remus, were taken from their mother and left by the river Tiber to starve. A mother wolf found the babies and looked after them until they were old enough to take care of themselves. Years later, Mars (the Roman God of war) told the boys to build a city where they had been found. The two boys built this city, but ended up at war with each other. Romulus won the battle and the city became known as Rome.
