Near the Ocean (1967). Content and Description

Published in 1967, Near the Ocean was written at the height of Lowell’s political activism. In 1965 he refused to attend the White House Festival of the Arts, to which President Lyndon B. Johnson had invited him. The public protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam earned Lowell more attention than did most of his writing career.

In the wake of the publicity, he felt the need to write a more public form of poetry in order to address the issues he suddenly found himself discussing. To do that, Lowell returned to the formal metrical patterns and strict rhyme schemes of his early verse. The collection includes a number of loose translations of Horace, Juvenal, and Dante, along with several original poems. The most politically relevant of those poems are contained within the opening series of five poems, titled Near the Ocean, the last of which is also titled, “Near the Ocean.”

The first poem, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” opens with an existentialist lament for the order and beauty of pastoral poetry, which, in the past, captured the image of a simpler, freer world. Lowell read existentialist philosophers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and openly discussed them in terms of early poems such as “Skunk Hour.” In the first stanza of “Waking Early Sunday Morning” Lowell dramatizes one of existentialism’s central tenets, that existence is absurd. The first lines seem to praise the idea of liberty: “O to break loose, like the chinook / salmon jumping and falling back.” By the end of the stanza, however, the salmon becomes a symbol of futility: Its pointless task of swimming upstream to seek freedom only culminates in arriving “alive enough to spawn and die” (383).

That opening passage colors the shifting tones of each poem in the series. Lowell goes through his usual gamut of criticisms, starting with religion; then moving on to American militarism, politics, contemporary culture, social conflict; and finally ending with his deeply affected views on marriage. Unlike in many of his early poems and criticisms, however, Lowell makes very specific attacks on the different institutions he writes about, rather than depending heavily on allusion and metaphor. For example, the fourth poem, “Central Park,” uses two different cat images to address poverty in America by describing the “deserter’s rich / Welfare lying out of reach” (392). His general discontent culminates in “Near the Ocean,” a poem he dedicated to his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.

Lowell considered “Near the Ocean” to be the most ambitious of the series. It is also the least public, as it offers, according to Lowell, “a nightmarish, obscure reverie on marriage, both vengeful and apologetic” (Mariani 336). Lowell also cited Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” as a model for his poem. While the association may serve to aggrandize his intent, it also suggests that, as Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” “Near the Ocean” deals with a crisis of faith.

With allusions to Medusa’s beheading along with the pained language of betrayals, abortions, and hard-veined elms, it certainly does not constitute the typical marriage poem. As the rest of the opening series to Near the Ocean does, the last poem laments the loss of order in our world and its result—the difficulty of forming meaningful relationships.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The Near the Ocean series incorporates a self- aware understanding of Lowell’s changes in perspective. In “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” for instance, he writes about his own shifting moods in relation to observations:

I watch a glass of water wet with a fine fuzz of icy sweat, silvery colors touched with sky, serene in their neutrality— yet if I shift, or change my mood, I see some object made of wood, background behind it of brown grain, to darken, but not to stain. (384)

Here Lowell plays with the idea of figure ground, the ability to distinguish between foreground and background based on contrast. A shifting perspective, as illustrated by the preceding passage, will completely alter the image and focus of one’s observations. Consider the idea of shifting perspectives in terms of “Near the Ocean.” How does the passage describe the poem’s shifts in attitudes and attentions?

2. “Central Park” and William Carlos Williams’s poem “Sunday in the Park” both make observations about park life that delve past the leisurely activity into thoughts about economic and social relationships. However, although they are similar in some ways, the poems are structured according to radically different poetic sensibilities. Read both and discuss how each uses structure to accomplish different things. Where do the poems’ meanings intersect, despite the structural differences?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Altieri, Charles. “Poetry in a Prose World: Robert Lowell’s ‘Life Studies.’” In Modern Poetry Studies, edited by Jerome Mazzaro. Columbus, Ohio: C. E. Merrill, 1971.

“Robert Lowell and the Difficulties of Escaping Modernism.” In Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.
Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, N.J.: University of Princeton Press, 1978.

Bedford, William. “The Morality of Form in the Poetry of Robert Lowell.” Ariel 9, no. 1 (January 1978): 3-17.
Bell, Vereen M. Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 137-139.

Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 68-70.
Doherty, Paul. “The Poet as Historian: ‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell.” Concerning Poetry 1, no. 2 (Fall 1968): 37-41.
Doreski, William. Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999.