My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow. (1959). Content and Description

Lowell rewrote sections of “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” several times and published part 3 in Botteghe Oscure before collecting the poem as a whole in his most famous book, Life Studies. Life Studies was published in 1959, eight years after The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and marked a great redirection in Lowell’s writing. In the wake of several emotional and mental breakdowns, he sought psychological treatment, which led him to write about his childhood. The frankly personal prose he produced became the source of many of the poems included in Life Studies, particularly in the fourth section of the book. “My Last Afternoon” is the first poem in that section.

Unlike the formal verse of Lord Weary’s Castle or the epic monologues of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies includes free-verse poems that detail the specificities of Lowell’s life and disclose the troubled state of his mind. Part 1 exemplifies the more relaxed tone of Lowell’s so-called confessional poetry: “One afternoon in 1922, / I sat on the stone porch, looking through / screens as black-grained as drifting coal” (163). The natural voice, although divided into lines, reads as prose. Indeed, much of the poem was derived from Lowell’s autobiographical notes, and, taking a cue from William Carlos Williams, he tried to achieve “a tone that sounded a little like conversation” (Axelrod, Life and Art 95).

Some critics have lambasted Life Studies in general and “My Last Afternoon” in particular for the loss of the intensity found in Lowell’s earlier works. While they tend to make concessions for certain poems—such as “Skunk Hour”—the common argument runs that the work relaxes to the point of becoming slack. One particularly critical writer, William Bedford, claims:

Not only does there appear to be no poetic logic behind the choice of line lengths, or behind the random selection of detail . . . not only does the technique fail utterly to generate any sense of moral urgency or significance; but the very flatness of the language leaves one with a strong suspicion that Lowell has merely sought to make verses out of his prose material simply in order to have sufficient poems to fill a volume. (Mosaic 19, no. 4 [Fall 1986]: 121-132)

Despite such assessments, however, “My Last Afternoon” does retain distinctly poetic attributes. Part 3, for instance, demonstrates concision, introduces strong images, and makes subtle use of slant rhyme.

On the whole, “My Last Afternoon” signals a simpler and more understated poetic voice for Lowell, while the content continues to involve complex subjects. The plain language renders difficult pictures of failed commitments, family tensions, and chronic illness, all seen in relation to Lowell as a five-and-a-half-year-old. The language may lack a certain dramatic pitch that Lowell is capable of, but its naked honesty reveals the intensity of his familial history and his psychological state by giving readers the raw material that always seemed in his life to be “troubling the waters” (165).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Lowell writes “My Last Afternoon” as an adult remembering his childhood. The poem, however, includes the child’s sensibilities and perspectives by describing the world as he saw it at age five. Locate parts of the poem where Lowell switches or mixes the perspectives. How does he navigate to the consciousnesses to create a sense of irony in the poem? How does that irony relate to the poem’s overall tone?

2. An image of young Lowell playing in the dirt recurs several times throughout the poem. He writes in part 1, “One of my hands was cool on a pile / of black earth, the other warm / on a pile of lime,” setting the two substances apart as opposites (163). The final lines in “My Last Afternoon” set the two values apart again and then say “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color” (167). What might Lowell mean by “one color”? If we take the soil and lime as symbols of opposite value, what meaning might their blending hold for the other symbolic images in the poem?

3. In part 4 of “My Last Afternoon,” Lowell calls himself Agrippina, sister of the Roman emperor Caligula and mother of Nero. Apparently Lowell’s uncle read him stories about Nero’s kingdom. Agrippina, interestingly, had many elicit and taboo sexual relationships, including open participation in Caligula’s court, marriage to her uncle, and incestuous encounters with her son. Nero eventually banished her from the kingdom. What then does this metaphor about Lowell’s identity suggest about his childhood and his familial relationships?