Dec 27, 2009
“Beyond the Alps” is a lyric poem written in iambic pentameter; each of its three stanzas is a sonnet. The rhyming pattern of each sonnet is irregular and typifies, as do other elements in the poem, Robert Lowell’s experiments with convention.
Lowell’s career was marked by several dramatic shifts in style, and this poem does not fit snugly into a formal category. The epigraph suggests that the poem is an occasional piece, written as a consequence of Pope Pius XII’s pronouncement that made Mary’s bodily Assumption church dogma; however, the structure...
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