Waking Early Sunday Morning by Robert Lowell

First published: 1967, in Near the Ocean

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Waking Early Sunday Morning” is a long lyric poem, a meditation on mortality in fourteen eight-line stanzas. The title invites comparison with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” and indeed the poem may be read as Robert Lowell’s pessimistic, Puritan-tinged reply to Stevens’s celebration of an earthly paradise. Stevens evokes a lushly fertile world in which the “balm and beauty of the earth” is heaven enough, but, in Lowell’s vision, the earth is no longer a garden but an exhausted volcano, its violence all but spent, “a ghost/ orbiting forever lost” in a universe empty of meaning. The poem is written in the first person, both singular and plural, so that the speaker is sometimes “I” and sometimes “we.” The speaker, implicitly Lowell himself, moves from the personal to the prophetic, expressing first a desire for freedom, then a wistful longing for lost religious faith, and finally regret for the doomed planet and its children fated to fall “in small war on the heels of small/ war.”

“Waking Early Sunday Morning” is an internal journey through the thoughts of the speaker as he awakens. The poem begins with a dreaming image of freedom and escape, the wish to “break loose” like a salmon swimming against the current, leaping and finally clearing the waterfall to reach its native stream. Yet the image carries its own darkness: The salmon braves the current only to “spawn and die.” The second stanza finds the speaker waking from his dream and feeling the childlike joy of a Sunday morning’s leisure ahead, “squatting like a dragon on/ time’s hoard before the day’s begun”—a line that echoes seventeenth century English poet Andrew Marvell, whose “The Garden” is also recalled by the rhymed octosyllabic couplets of Lowell’s poem.

The poet’s awareness moves from himself to his surroundings, from mice and termites in the walls to the harbor view outside his window, from a glass of water at his bedside to the “new electric bells” calling worshipers to Sunday church service. Through several stanzas, the poet explores this lost connection to the “Faith of our fathers,” to the white steeples of New England now reduced to “vanishing emblems” of a salvation no longer assured. This Puritan faith, recalled in the lines of hymns still sung but not believed, was not without its own terrors, yet it gave to its followers a sense of order and a chance for redemption, a “loophole for the soul.”

In the closing five stanzas, Lowell explores the condition of a people whose only god has become the god of war, of the United States as a Philistine empire of excess and military might without true direction. Again, in stanza 12, there is the longing to break free, to find redemption in some pastoral summer. However, the poet allows no return to innocence, no escape from this wounded earth: “Pity the planet, all joy gone/ from this sweet volcanic cone.” Humanity is left forever in the ruins of the paradise it has destroyed.

Forms and Devices

“Waking Early Sunday Morning” uses a relatively strict and demanding metrical form: the iambic tetrameter or four-beat couplet. Each of its fourteen stanzas contains four couplets or eight lines. Though the form and meter echo Marvell’s “The Garden,” Lowell’s poem is modern in its diction and subject matter, and the regularity of form is varied by Lowell’s use of off-rhyme. In stanza 3, for example, Lowell rhymes “night” with “foot” and “sun’s” with “dawns.” These slight irregularities, together with Lowell’s use of three seven-syllable lines in the last stanza, give the poem an edge that keeps the reader from being lulled by its musicality.

The word pairs Lowell chooses for rhymes, and even his line breaks, often challenge the reader’s expectations. “Waking Early Sunday Morning” does not actually break poetic rules, but it defies poetic conventions, as when the speaker, in the midst of a visionary exhortation (“O to break loose”), suddenly breaks in with “Stop, back off.” The voice abruptly becomes more casual, more intimate. There are similar shifts in diction throughout the poem. Sometimes the speaker is musing, personal, and introspective; sometimes he is almost biblically oratorical; and sometimes he is almost comradely or Whitman-like, addressing readers and pulling them into the “we” of the poem. These shifts in rhetorical style reflect the speaker’s shifts in perception from dream state to consciousness, from casual observation to philosophical speculation, and from wry amusement to despair.

Language in the poem is playful yet precise. Lowell delights in using words that resonate with other poems he has written, with works of other writers from Roman poet Horace to Marvell to Stevens, and with figures and events from history. Thus the description of the nocturnal animals in the third stanza—“obsessive, casual, sure of foot”—recalls Lowell’s own “Skunk Hour” and its mother skunk and kittens searching for food in the moonlight. The “rainbow smashing a dry fly” in stanza 2 is clearly a trout but also calls to mind the last line of Lowell’s poem “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” which in turn refers to the biblical story of Noah with its comforting story of God’s covenant. That comfort is subverted in “Waking Early Sunday Morning”: There is no promise that the world will not be destroyed; what God may not do, humanity will.

Biblical imagery and literary allusions abound in “Waking Early Sunday Morning.” The glass the poet gazes through in stanza 5 and the line “Each day, He shines through darker glass” in stanza 9 echo the biblical metaphor “For now we see through a glass, darkly” (I Corinthians 13:12). Elsewhere in the poem, U.S. military forces are seen in terms of an army of elephants, recalling Hannibal, whose exploits are recounted in Lowell’s translation of Roman poet Juvenal’s tenth satire. Other phrases suggest events from more recent history: The reference to chance assassinations is surely the poet’s response to the violent events of the 1960’s. “Waking Early Sunday Morning” is a poem that seems constructed in layers, broadly referential yet personal, dense with many meanings yet still accessible on an immediate, physical level.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould, ed. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Cosgrave, Patrick. The Public Poetry of Robert Lowell. New York: Taplinger, 1970.

Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982.

Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Perloff, Marjorie G. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Wallingford, Katherine. Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.