Sailing Home from Rapallo

By Robert Lowell 1917–1977 Robert Lowell

[February 1954]

Your nurse could only speak Italian,

but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,

and tears ran down my cheeks....

When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,

the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova

was breaking into fiery flower.

The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds

blasting like jack-hammers across

the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,

recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.

Mother traveled first-class in the hold;

her Risorgimento black and gold casket

was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides....

While the passengers were tanning

on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,

our family cemetery in Dunbarton

lay under the White Mountains

in the sub-zero weather.

The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—

so many of its deaths had been midwinter.

Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,

its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.

A fence of iron spear-hafts

black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.

The only “unhistoric” soul to come here

was Father, now buried beneath his recent

unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.

Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:

Occasionem cognosce,

seemed too businesslike and pushing here,

where the burning cold illuminated

the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:

twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.

Frost had given their names a diamond edge....

In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,

Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.

The corpse

was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Robert Lowell, “Sailing Home from Rapallo” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1976 by Robert Lowell. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Selected Poems (1976)

Biography

Robert Lowell is best known for his volume Life Studies, but his true greatness as an American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work. In the 1940s he wrote intricate and tightly patterned poems that incorporated traditional meter and rhyme; in the late 1950s when he published Life Studies, he began to write startlingly original personal or "confessional" poetry in much looser forms and meters; in the 1960s he wrote . . .

Continue reading this biography