Night Sweat (1963). Content and Description

First published in the Encounter in 1963, then a second time in the Kenyon Review in 1964, “Night Sweat” was collected in Lowell’s 1964 book For the Union Dead, with slight revisions. After the drastic aesthetic changes that his poetry underwent in the 1950s, which culminated in the informal confessions of Life Studies, Lowell seems to have drifted back toward the traditionalism of his earlier writing without ever reverting to the careful hyperbole of Lord Weary’s Castle. Instead, For the Union Dead captures some of the drama of his early poems through the use of more idiomatic American diction. “Night Sweat” in particular demonstrates Lowell’s ability to rejuvenate old poetic forms with vibrant language.

He divides the poem in two halves, each one a sonnet. We see in the first half a nighttime scene that dramatizes the pain of living and writing. The author depicts himself in the throes of a nightmare, a panic attack, or an equally terrifying experience. The poem does not explicitly say what accosts the speaker, but the language used to describe the night sweat suggests despair and agitation. We learn that the experience recurs frequently: “for ten nights now I’ve felt the creeping damp” (375). The calm phrasing of the line—with its colloquial “now I’ve”—gives a sense of resignation, while the phrase “creeping damp” adds a frightening dimension to the poem’s tone.

The second stanza moves from the dark of night into the light of day. Lowell writes, “I feel the light lighten my leaded eyelids” as he awakes into a world considerably less painful than the experience described in the first stanza. Instead of living and writing alone, with the “bias of existing” wringing him dry, he encounters an Other. The “You!” of the first line, we discover in the eighth, is his wife, whose “lightness alters everything” (375). We can infer that part of his misery in the first half of the poem stems from the difficulties of marriage.

The problems of the first stanza regarding his inability to write outside himself arise again in the second. The poem ends with an act of supplication. He begs, “if I cannot clear / the surface of these troubled waters here, / absolve me, help me, Dear Heart” (375). Clearing the surface of troubled waters metaphorically addresses Lowell’s attempt to communicate with another person. In many of his poems on marriage we see only sadness. “Night Sweat,” with its dual sonnets, provides a balance unlike poems such as “Man and Wife” or “ ‘ To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.’”

Rather than acquiescing to depression, he tries to understand it as a process of failed communication. In the end, though, he fails to accept responsibility, expecting, instead, that his wife will forgive him while also “bearing this world’s dead weight and cycle on [her] back” (375).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Lowell’s later book The Dolphin is composed completely of sonnets, many of which deal with his last two marriages. Pick any poem from the collection and discuss its use of form and content as compared to “Night Sweat.” Do the poems use the same form to address similar feelings? If not, why use the same form?

2. In 1961 Lowell praised a poem by Yves Winters called “The Marriage.” The line in “Night Sweat” that mentions the urn alludes to Winters’s poem. Read both and discuss the difference. How does Lowell recontextualize the urn image to make it his own?