SOURCE: "War and Redemption in Land of Unlikeness," in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 1-14.

In 1943, Robert Lowell, disturbed by the Allied bombing of German cities and facing induction, sent a "declaration of conscience" to President Roosevelt and the local draft board. Lowell declared himself unalterably opposed not to war itself but to the conduct of this war, particularly to the bombing of civilian populations and to the intransigence of the Allied requirement of unconditional surrender, which he felt would lead (as Versailles had) to an untenable post-war situation:

The war has entered on an unforeseen phase: one that can by no possible extension of the meaning of the words be called defensive. By demanding unconditional surrender we reveal our complete confidence in the outcome, and declare that we are prepared to wage a war without quarter or principles, to the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan. (Collected Prose)

Although a conscientious objector in a limited sense, Lowell was not a pacifist since he indicated his willingness to fight in a purely defensive situation. Moreover, the poems he wrote in the early years of the war demonstrate that he was not only fascinated by modern warfare but determined to use it aesthetically. The poems of Land of Unlikeness (1944), his first book, show him struggling with two opposing desires: one, to embrace the coldly objective but enthralling beauty of modern warfare; the other, to subsume the imagery of war in tropes of penance and redemption.

Lowell faced two other difficulties in this early work. One was psychological—he was not a pacifist, was intrigued by war and drawn to it, so his impulse toward penance and redemption, insofar as they require the rejection of violence, was not wholehearted. The other problem was his failure to find an adequate trope or body of figuration (in Eliot's term, an objective correlative) for his desire for personal and national penance. His solution was to wrestle conventional Catholic iconography into contorted juxtaposition with the imagery of war, but the resulting grotesquerie supports rather than opposes the strong sense of cultural disintegration the poems convey. The central strategy of T. S. Eliot's version of modernism—the refusal of unmediated tradition and simultaneous embrace of the preconditions and privileges of tradition—shapes the poems, despite the poet's attempt to embrace a more Thomistic and hierarchical Catholic iconography. Thus in a "land of unlikeness" the more powerful but less holy aesthetic of Protestant resistance reshapes sacred imagery to its needs, and the poems achieve a partial and unwitting synthesis.

This essay will consider "On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception: 1942," "The Bomber," "Christmas Eve in the Time of War," and "Cistercians in Germany" to illustrate the tension between the poet's competing desires to acknowledge his fascination with war and to censure both war and his own unruly will. Lowell wanted to normalize modern warfare by imposing the language of classical and Napoleonic wars; his objections to the bombing of cities derive not only from conventional moral outrage but from his sense that the aesthetic continuity of war—which is an ethical as well as artistic construct—has been violated. Underlying this paradoxical dilemma is Lowell's recognition that war, like poetry, is a form of discourse, one that in this instance has been usurped by the ultra-rationality of post-Enlightenment thought, to which he instinctively opposes an almost medieval sense of the mystical power of religious discourse. Long before Michel Foucault would systematically delineate the failure of rational humanism (in studies such as Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things), Lowell's early poetry embodies a Nietzschean sense of the insidiously anti-human quality of the Enlightenment faith in reason.

In "On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception: 1942" the primary figure of penance and redemption is the Virgin Mary, the "Mother of God, whose burly love / Turns swords to plowshares," while Eisenhower represents a Caesar-like secular heroism that has "won / Significant laurels." As with many of Lowell's early and later poems, the modifiers betray the tension between conflicting desires. That Mary's love should be "burly" indicates its worldly dimension, its bulk and brawn and utility; while Eisenhower's "significant laurels" link the present to the glorious history of warfare. Further, the wish to "make this holiday with Mars / Your feast Day" would bring Christian and pagan, military and religious worlds together in a suitably ecumenical manner. But the speaker must resist the kind of idealism that finds religious fervor and militaristic ambition compatible, acknowledge his ancestry in violence, and empathize with the victims of the war:

     Bring me tonight no axe to grind
     On wheels of the Utopian mind:
       Six thousand years
     Cain's blood has drummed into my ears,
     Shall I wring plums from Plato's bush
     When Burma's and Bizerte's dead
       Must puff and push
       Blood into bread?

Grinding an axe on wheels of the Utopian mind is undesirable not only because it would blunt both the speaker's distaste for and admiration of war, but because it would distance him from the blood and bread of war, the texture of suffering. As a poet he would find this loss of empathy intolerable; but any attempt to reconcile his conflicting desires might generate exactly the Utopian state of mind that would ease the rough and tumble of his imagery. Because the language is so jagged and aggressive (calling Mary a "nimrod," for example), the last two stanzas uncomfortably mingle holy communion, war, and cannibalism, which is certainly not Lowell's intention but rather a product of his fevered embrace of tactile and sanguinary images:

     Oh, if soldiers mind you well
     They shall find you are their belle
       And belly too;
     Christ's bread and beauty came by you,
     Celestial Hoyden, when our Lord
     Gave up the weary Ghost and died,
       You shook a sword
       From his torn side.
     Over the seas and far away
     They feast the fair and bloody day
       When mankind's Mother,
     Jesus' Mother, like another
     Nimrod danced on Satan's head.
     The old Snake lopes to his shelled hole;
       Man eats the Dead
       From pole to pole.

The poem seems at first to abandon its militaristic leanings and embrace a sentimental reconciliation in which Mary would simply comfort soldiers, heal them, and banish "The old Snake" to a "shelled hole," replaying the familiar old drama. The last two lines, however, shock the poem back into satire: "Man eats the Dead / From pole to pole," the speaker concludes—an image which Jerome Mazzaro sees as one of hope, but which might also be seen as an ironic suggestion that even with Satan banished, humankind continues to devour itself. This difficult juxtaposition of religious and geographical metaphors indicates the poem's failure to sustain the tension between religious fervor and war fever. Lowell's attempt to reconcile the two by making Mary the "belle / And belly too" of the soldiers produces a grotesque conflation of tactile and spiritual metaphors that reveals more fascination with the physical immediacy of war than with the spiritual glory of the Mother of Christ.

"The Bomber" seems a more straightforward attempt to satirize war and violence, ridiculing the bomber for assuming the role of God the avenger. Without the complementary role of redeemer, the bomber, despite its destructive force, merely plays at its role:

     The Master has had enough
     Of your trial flights and your cops
     And robbers and blindman's bluff,
     And Heaven's purring stops
     When Christ gives up the ghost.

The bomber fails to understand that with godlike powers go the responsibilities of a god. To pretend to power one does not possess is childish, tolerable only until the Master tires of such antics. But the satire turns uneasy when the poem notes how cruelly effective this child's play is:

     You nosed about the clouds
     And warred on the wormy sod;
     And your thunderbolts fast as light
     Blitzed a wake of shrouds.
     O godly Bomber, and most
     A god when cascading tons
     Baptized the infidel Huns
     For the Holy Ghost …

Though intended to satirize with the language missionaries have used for centuries to rationalize the destruction of native peoples in the name of God, this passage also betrays Lowell's fascination with the destructive power of the bombings, and it is in part his own fascination that causes his revulsion. The language—"Blitzed a wake of shrouds"—describes a cartoon-like killing, too unreal to convince the reader that people are actually dying here. Lowell's hard Anglo-Saxon consonants may be intended to approximate the harsh mechanical grind of modern warfare, but the language is so removed from gruesome actuality that it privileges the bomber, however unwillingly, as having the only real function. One need only compare this to Randall Jarrell's "Eighth Air Force" poems (though they too have been criticized for their dreamlike distance from their subjects) to see how detached from reality this poem is, how comic-book-like, and how ambivalent.

The Yeatsian italicized refrain "And [or When] Christ gave up the ghost" adds a note of seriousness that the rest of the poem doesn't quite attain, partly because the poet, despite his rage at the way the "Freedoms" have chosen to "police the world," finds the bomber with its "goggled pilots" a figure of fascination as well as of irresponsible destruction. The "unlikeness" in this poem lies not only in the way in which the bomber is unlike the god its role suggests but in the ways the speaker is both repelled by and drawn to the figure of destruction. Again, modifiers reveal Lowell's ambivalence: "Daredevil" sky, "wormy" sod (privileging the sky-god bomber over the lowly earthlings), "thunderbolts fast as light." Caught up in admiration of the bomber's power, the speaker only half-recovers his censorious stance in the second and third stanzas, and as a result the pious refrain seems mawkish and insincere.

The central motif in "Christmas Eve in the Time of War" is the further torture of Christ by capitalist greed and the threat that war will inflict even worse agonies ("Tomorrow Mars will break his bones"). By juxtaposing Christian and classical figures the poem attempts to suggest that the war represents a conflict between opposing visions or versions of the world, a conflict that finds a psychological parallel in the speaker of the poem. According to the subtitle, this speaker is "A Capitalist" who "Meditates by a Civil War Monument." This capitalist longs for his materialist heroes (Santa Claus and Hamilton) to "break the price-controller's stranglehold" and by freeing capital to restore the pre-apocalyptic world of his childhood. Somewhat paradoxically, he also longs to "spare the Child a crust of mould" but cannot, because his world, even in his childhood, has been one in which money is an ethic that for him replaced religious consolation:

                Twenty years ago
     I strung my stocking on the tree—if Hell's
     Inactive sting stuck in the stocking's toe,
     Money would draw it out.

The argument in this poem is between the trope of suffering, which belongs to Christ but which the capitalist wants to claim for himself, and the trope of war-as-power, of Mars, which represents an ironic apocalypse (ironic because the trope also embodies the Christ of apocalypse with his drawn sword) that reflects the world's refusal of the consolations of the Redeemer:

     Brazenly gracious, Mars is open arms,
     The sabers of his statues slash the moon;
     Their pageantary understanding forms
     Anonymous machinery from raw men,
     It rides the whirlwind it directs the drums.

Hardly any wonder that faced with this whirlwind the capitalist bawls "for Santa Claus and Hamilton," but he cannot conceal his awe, if not admiration, for the power of Mars. The capitalist himself, presumably on a smaller scale, has wielded such power by using his money to manufacture a different kind of "Anonymous machinery from raw men." "Christmas Eve in the Time of War" speaks in the voice of a persona; in its revised version, in Lord Weary's Castle, as "Christmas Eve Under Hooker's Statue," the poem speaks in the voice of a poet musing to himself, a voice that however inwardly directed seems even more fiercely intent on confronting war with the fruitless history of war. The speakers of both versions, however, remain enthralled by the dumb power of war, the "blundering butcher."

The "unlikeness" at the heart of "Christmas Eve in the Time of War" is internalized in the figure of Christ, who though in danger of having his bones broken by Mars has "come with water and with fire" to assert his apocalyptic role. The child-Christ, like the child-capitalist, is subsumed in the absent figure of the capitalist's child … dead upon the field of honor," so the poem rightly concludes "woe unto the rich that are with child" because gold cannot compensate for the loss of a child, or even for the loss of childhood. In fact, venality is to blame for this state of loss, both the literal loss of the dead child and the lost childhood, corrupted early by the love of money and the belief that it constituted a bulwark against sin.

The trope of war-as-power dominates the poem by excluding the trope of redemption and absorbing the trope of suffering. The despairing note of the closure, though properly Old Testament-prophetic, suggests how much more appealing are the images of punishment than those of forgiveness and redemption. The theological paradox lies in the invocation of the Christ-child rather than God the Father, necessitating an uncomfortable conflation of the gentle child Jesus with the stern warrior-Christ of the Second Coming. But this conflation is precisely the point of the poem, which centers on the capitalist's loss of his childhood to money-love and his perception of the war as retribution (a just retribution?) for what this sacrifice of childhood implies about his religious stance. Since rejection of one's own childhood implies rejection of the childhood of Jesus, and with it the refusal of Christ's role of savior, the capitalist has left himself only the dour figure of apocalypse. The later version of the poem drops this melodrama and becomes a simpler and more focused meditation on the statue of Hooker (a Civil War hero) as an aesthetic embodiment of war and its consequences. The earlier version, however, better portrays Lowell's sense of cultural disintegration, and with dramatic effectiveness portrays the complex relationship between the social corruption that begins in childhood and its consequences for the adult.

In "Cistercians in Germany" the monks of the title are figures of penance and renunciation, for the sake of which "corpse and soul" should "go bare," but who have been functionally displaced by Hitler and his supporters. The opposing and central trope of the poem is embodied in the Nazi party's vulgar ideal of social order:

     Here corpse and soul go bare. The Leader's headpiece
     Capers to his imagination's tumblings;
     The Party barks at its unsteady fledglings
     To goose-step in red-tape, and microphones
     Sow the four winds with babble. Here the Dragon's
     Sucklings tumble on steel-scales and puff
     Billows of cannon-fodder from the beaks
     Of bee-hive camps, munition-pools and scrap-heaps,
     And here the serpent licks up Jesus' blood,
     Valhalla vapors from the punctured tank.
     Rank upon rank the cast-out Christians file
     Unter den Linden to the Wilhelmsplatz,
     Where Caesar paws the gladiator's breast;
     His martial bumblings and hypnotic yawp
     Drum out the pastors of these aimless pastures;
     And what a muster of scarred hirelings and scared sheep
     To cheapen and popularize the price of blood!

Because renunciation is not the opposite but the complement to order, the poem presents, surely inadvertently, the possibility that the Nazi party, not the Cistercians, represents the only redemption available. The "cast-out Christians" seem both disenfranchised and deflated. The poem describes as "sheep" both the followers of Hitler—witless pawns—and the followers of Christ who deny the ego to save their souls. The speaker of the poem, we learn at the close, is one of the monks who "lift bloody hands to wizened Bernard, / To Bernard gathering his canticle of flowers," and assert the survival of the Christian ideal. But this vision of actual redemption arrives too late to save the poem from becoming a rather morbid dwelling upon the vicissitudes of totalitarian order, which seems to imply that for the common lot of humanity this secular cruelty is the only appropriate form of salvation:

                                    Here
     Puppets have heard the civil words of Darwin
     Clang Clang, while the divines of screen and air
     Twitter like Virgil's harpies eating plates,
     And lions scamper up the rumps of sheep.
     The Shepherd knows his sheep have gone to market;
     Sheep need no pastoral piping for the kill,
     Only cold mutton and a fleecing.

Lowell's infatuation with puns not only generates the "fleecing" at the end of this passage but tempts him into confounding and then fusing disparate meanings of "sheep" and so deconstructing the religious center of the poem, the implied orthodox argument that submission leads to salvation. Fascinated against his will by the harsh images of order generated by his poem, Lowell admits that Christian passivity and meekness might submit too readily to Fascism. It is possible to claim that this poem demonstrates how complementary Christianity and Fascism are, though this observation violates the conscious ethical stance of the author. The ambiguity of his language, however, suggests how attractive Lowell found tropes of social and military power, how tenuous was his faith (his aesthetic faith, at any rate) in the figure of Christ the redeemer, how fragile that faith seemed when under the pressures of war.

The effect of this poem, then, is to appropriate sacred imagery—the image of Christ the Shepherd leading his flock to God—for the poet's need to somehow synthesize tropes of power and order and tropes of redemption into an aesthetic whole. The unsatisfactory nature of the result is clear in the way Lowell rewrote the conclusion of "Cistercians in Germany" to suit the new poem "At the Indian Killer's Grave" in Lord Weary's Castle. "Cistercians" concludes by invoking the figure of Bernard "gathering his canticle of flowers" and transforming his soul into "a bridal chamber fresh with flowers, / And all his body one extatic womb…." This transcendental experience, though, awkwardly mixes sexual overtones by confusing genders, abstracting the metaphor too far from concrete actuality. It confounds a quasi-sexual moment of religious ecstasy with one of unwitting transvestism, as if the masculine world of war, power, and imposed order had crushed the last vestiges of manliness from the saint and driven him to the embrace of his anima. Though this reading may seem forced, the poem invokes it by inadequately dramatizing the transition from scabrous social vision to transcendent metaphor. Because the earlier imagery has been so dramatic, one might expect comparable dramatization of the ecstasy of Bernard as he escapes, through the gathering of flowers (itself a sexual dramatization), the violent quotidian world. Unfortunately, such dramatization requires visualization, and this sort of religious imagery is intended to touch the spirit rather than the senses. That is, one should experience it with the meditative faculty rather than the perceptual one. But Lowell has already committed his poem to the imagery and language of dramatic excess. He somewhat mitigates this excess by the capitalization of Shepherd, which warns us that we are moving toward the world of religious allegory. But the conclusion occurs too abruptly, and attempts to depart too radically from the tone and movement of the bulk of the poem. Lowell's purpose is to draw a violent contrast between the frenzied order of Nazi Germany and the somewhat abstract world of contemplation occupied by the monks; however, the imagery of the early part of the poem is so strong and engaging that the effect is to make Bernard's meditative ascension seem faintly ridiculous. Lowell has not yet learned how decisively the tone of a short poem, once firmly established, shapes the reading of the whole.

Only a year or so later, when he revised the closure of "Cistercians" for "At the Indian Killer's Grave," a much stronger poem, Lowell would demonstrate how apt was John Crowe Ransom's comment in 1945: "I don't know who has grown up in verse more than you, these last few years" (Lowell papers). "At the Indian Killer's Grave" shows how early Lowell began to move toward a more personal poetics of testimony. Here the voice of the poem seems coincident with the voice of the poet, so the reader may understand the concluding moment of religious vision as an expression of a psychologically verifiable presence rather than as an inchoate attempt to portray a saint's peculiar experience:

     I ponder on the railing at this park:
     Who was the man who sowed the dragon's teeth,
     That fabulous or fancied patriarch
     Who sowed so ill for his descent, beneath
     King's Chapel in this underworld and dark?
     John, Matthew, Luke and Mark,
     Gospel me to the Garden, let me come
     Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers—
     Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers
     And her whole body an ecstatic womb,
     As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom.

Because the soul and womb are now Mary's, rather than the visionary's the sexual content no longer requires our special indulgence. It remains somewhat awkward (especially in the phrase "Gospel me to the Garden"), but placed in a less insistently violent and dramatic yet more historically situated meditation it seems a fit conclusion to a poem concerned with the religious and social hypocrisy of early New England. The Catholic vision of Mary, however fraught, in this instance, with overstated sexuality, is an appropriate rebuke to the Protestantism that motivated the excesses of cruelty and the self-deluded rationalizations of the Puritans.

However, when Lowell revised his poems for Lord Weary's Castle most of the overt references to the war disappeared, along with poems like "The Bomber," not because they suddenly seemed dated but because, possibly, Lowell realized how difficult it was for him to control a seductive and compelling language of violence and power. Allen Tate in his introduction to Land of Unlikeness correctly observes that Lowell is "consciously a Catholic poet"; but unconsciously Lowell demonstrates a fascination with violence, imposed order, and unchecked power. The real source of unlikeness is not the land but the mind of the poet, and Lowell would eventually recognize that for himself and turn to the writing of more frankly autobiographical, self-exploratory poems. Once the poet began, like Wordsworth, to contemplate his own development, he had no difficulty portraying his early and ongoing fascination with war and his propensity for violence:

     There was rebellion, father, when the mock
     French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed
     Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock,
     The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned
     My arm that cast your house upon your head
     And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.
 
     ("Rebellion," Lord Weary's Castle)
 
     And I, bristling and manic,
     skulked in the attic,
     and got two hundred French generals by name,
     from A to V—from Augereau to Vandamme.
     I used to dope myself asleep
     naming those unpronounceables like sheep.
 
     ("Commander Lowell," Life Studies)

In much of the early work, Lowell writes in an impersonal voice and finds himself wrestling with unlikenesses that impose conflicting languages of varying but unequal strength, and very often poems of religious intention veer perilously close to becoming paeans to arbitrary power. But with the fashioning of Lord Weary's Castle—building on strong first-person poems from Land of Unlikeness such as "In Memory of Arthur Winslow"—it seems clear that Lowell's proper voice—his surest and most controlled—was not that of a dramatic figure or persona but what Eliot calls "the voice of the poet" either talking to himself or "addressing an audience."

This is not simply a matter of Lowell's suddenly discovering himself, either as person or poet, since he would continue to evolve in sometimes radical ways as both poet and citizen for the rest of his career. Rather it is a matter of rhetoric. Lowell's poems needed to learn to persuade themselves before they might persuade an audience, and to do this they needed the fiction of a central speaking consciousness, not the picture of a division between consciousness and unconsciousness. In time-honored lyric tradition, Lowell found that fiction most readily embodied in the first person speaker, especially when that speaker could be firmly placed in a landscape. If Lowell at the time of Land of Unlikeness was writing work that, as Stephen Yenser argues, "assumes a disjunction of the verbal symbol and the actual world" and "ignores the incorrigible referential function of words," he found this excursion into "pure poetry" unsatisfactory, and gradually moved toward a poetics more firmly rooted in experience.

Consider the difference between the openings of "Cistercians in Germany" (quoted above), with its generalized if vivid social description, and the opening of the "Five Years Later" section of "In Memory of Arthur Winslow," which establishes the speaker's consciousness at the center of the poem:

     This Easter, Arthur Winslow, five years gone,
     I come to bury you and not to praise
     The craft that netted a million dollars, late
     Mining in California's golden bays
     Then lost it all in Boston real estate;
     Then from the train, at dawn,
     Leaving Columbus in Ohio, shell
     On shell of our stark culture struck the sun
     To fill my head with all our father won
     When Cotton Mather wrestled with the fiends from Hell.

Lowell still entwines considerable social commentary into the latter passage, but he also establishes a particularized consciousness to testify to the psychological authenticity of these perceptions. Perhaps more than many other poets, Lowell would require this centering to control the tendency of his rhetoric to assume a life of its own and expose fascinations too politically or socially unkempt, and perhaps too inauthentic. The war poems of Land of Unlikeness reveal much more about the modern fascination with violence, power, and imposed order than Lowell probably intended, and reveal as well how thin a veneer was his Catholicism, which he gave up only a few years later. They also reveal his first tentative movement toward the conflation of self and history, a decisive rejection of the Enlightenment belief in objectivity and the conventional limitations of genre.

Most interestingly, perhaps, these early poems reveal how powerfully the rhetoric of war grips the modern (and postmodern) mind, how firmly entrenched are the tropes of violence, how readily they overwhelm tropes of religious consciousness and vision. Language, not reason, shapes the controlling ethos of poems like "The Bomber." To overcome the tendency of language to plummet to the very bottom of the unconscious, Lowell would have to face it "without face" in the naked first person, the exposed romantic ego of Life Studies and The Dolphin, who would eventually admit in "Facing Oneself" how constructed that ego is, how necessarily unrepentant and honest, and even how unreligious:

After a day indoors I sometimes see my face in the shaving mirror looks as old, frail and distinguished as my photographs—as established. But it doesn't make one feel the temptation to try to be a Christian.

(The Dolphin)

Lowell's struggle to face himself, which required a temporary surrender of epic and satiric ambitions in favor of lyric or meditative intimacy, was as hard-fought as any of the other struggles of modern literature. In writing Land of Unlikeness he hadn't yet learned that this struggle, not the attempt to satirize America and the world back to sanity, would consume most of his career; but already by 1944 his language was pushing him inward, toward the only source of fragile stability he would ever find.