The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket by Robert Lowell

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

 

                                             [FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA]

Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the                          whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

 

I

 

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—

The sea was still breaking violently and night   

Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light   

Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,   

He grappled at the net

With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:

The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,   

Its open, staring eyes

Were lustreless dead-lights

Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk   

Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close   

Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,   

Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose   

On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name   

Is blocked in yellow chalk.

Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea   

Where dreadnaughts shall confess

Its hell-bent deity,

When you are powerless

To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced

By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste   

In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute

To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet   

Recoil and then repeat

The hoarse salute.

 

II

 

Whenever winds are moving and their breath   

Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,   

The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death   

In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear   

The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall   

Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall   

Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash   

The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,   

As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears   

The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash   

The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids   

For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids   

Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones,   

Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush   

At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush   

Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones   

Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast   

Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.

 

III

 

All you recovered from Poseidon died

With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine   

Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,   

Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,   

Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod   

Guns, cradled on the tide,

Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock

Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand   

Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock

Our warships in the hand

Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues   

Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost

In the mad scramble of their lives. They died   

When time was open-eyed,

Wooden and childish; only bones abide

There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed   

Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news   

Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost   

Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick   

I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:   

“If God himself had not been on our side,   

If God himself had not been on our side,   

When the Atlantic rose against us, why,   

Then it had swallowed us up quick.”

 

IV

 

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale

Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell   

And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools   

To send the Pequod packing off to hell:   

This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,   

Snatching at straws to sail

Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,   

Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,   

Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:

Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail

 

For water, for the deep where the high tide   

Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.   

Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,   

Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,   

The beach increasing, its enormous snout   

Sucking the ocean’s side.

This is the end of running on the waves;

We are poured out like water. Who will dance

The mast-lashed master of Leviathans

Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

 

V

 

When the whale’s viscera go and the roll   

Of its corruption overruns this world

Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole   

And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword   

Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?

In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,   

The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,   

The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears   

The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags   

And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,   

Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,   

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers   

Where the morning stars sing out together

And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers   

The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide   

Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.

 

VI

 

OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM

 

There once the penitents took off their shoes   

And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;   

And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file   

Slowly along the munching English lane,   

Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose   

Track of your dragging pain.

The stream flows down under the druid tree,   

Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad   

The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad   

And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:

 

Our Lady, too small for her canopy,

Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness   

At all or charm in that expressionless

Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,

This face, for centuries a memory,

Non est species, neque decor,

Expressionless, expresses God: it goes

Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,   

Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem   

Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

 

VII

 

The empty winds are creaking and the oak   

Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,   

The boughs are trembling and a gaff   

Bobs on the untimely stroke

Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell   

In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;   

Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,   

Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:   

Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh   

Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,   

Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil   

You could cut the brackish winds with a knife   

Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime   

And breathed into his face the breath of life,   

And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.   

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.