All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive.
(Lowell)
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
(Plath)
Right now I am reading Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf 2017). The chapters all begin with lines from Lowell’s poems. I’m less familiar with his work than with Plath’s, and I keep being reminded of her. I love these lines from the same Lowell poem, and I hear still more echoes in Plath’s:
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.
Jamison’s book on Lowell is longer than her other works; it goes into far more detail than anyone but the most avid Lowell fans will find interesting. So I’ve been skipping around in it.