Waking in the Blue (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Robert Lowell
- First Published: 1959
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Class conflict, Autobiography, Mental illness, Sea or seafaring life, Captivity, Catholics or Catholic Church, Mental institutions, hospitals or asylums, Patients
The Poem
“Waking in the Blue” consists of forty lines divided into six uneven verse paragraphs. Though essentially free verse, the poem contains remnants of the rhymed couplets Robert Lowell used for the poem’s original composition (as he did for many poems in Life Studies).
The title points, first, to Lowell’s autobiographical experience of awakening at daybreak in a mental institution—a memory Lowell presents through a surrealistic metaphysical conceit in which he and his fellow patients are sea creatures swimming in the “agonized blue” of the...
[The entire page is 1497 words long]
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