A Sonnet a Day # 2: Robert Lowell's 'Dolphin'

For the second in the sonnet series, we’ll stick with the late twentieth century but cross the Atlantic, where Boston poet Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977) evolved a powerful blend of the autobiographical, journalistic, controversial, raggedy-chaotic, super-calculated and musical in a series of unrhymed fourteen-liners collected (insofar as they ever were) as the Notebook sonnets.

Seamus Heaney called Notebook "a massive accumulation of unrhymed sonnets, poems of immediate, unprepossessing, blunt-edged force." And Lowell himself said in the "Afterthought" to Notebook 1967-1968 that "in truth I seem to have felt mostly the joys of living; in remembering, in recording, thanks to the gift of the Muse, it is the pain."

This poem, Dolphin, almost celebrates that pain, a jagged masterpiece of remorse and pride, the one always undermining the other and vice versa...

Dolphin

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

The dolphin of the title is Lowell’s hard-done-by wife, the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. The poem as a whole is a confession (Lowell was thought of as the founder of a ‘confessional’ movement that used autobiographical facts as the basis for poems, a kind of verbal raw self portraiture) of the artist’s self-absorption and the hurt it has caused.

And yet … the craft and hidden design and the late volta into the punchline (‘injury … fighting … hand’, so punchline, geddit?) tells us that the poet and maybe the man aren’t utterly unforgiving of themselves.

There are useful intros to Lowell here and also here

And if Dolphin isn’t bleak enough, there’s this earlier, much more formal sonnet (the title is a reference to Milton, of whom much more later!)