Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East. Study Guide for The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. No matter how one allegorizes the deceased, nothing can bring them back. The speaker then references the captain from Moby-Dick who dies in the water. The speaker continues to spend time describing the various elements of a landscape including the wind. Waking Early Sunday Morning by Robert Lowell. Although he has a background in Automotive Engineering, having worked for McLaren testing supercars, Will has a keen eye for poetry and literature. The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. At the same time, the poem reads almost like biblical verses due to its density, but where those verses can be broken down and more easily digested, some lines in this poem remain slightly beyond sense no matter how closely the reader examines them. He imagines the Pequod trying to … all played out against the violent backdrop of the ocean. Lowell mentions his cousin and the drowned sailors of the past and uses another metaphor that depicts a fight against man’s lesser nature. For example, the transition between lines one and two of part two. The poem doles out a timely, if ominous, message. But this wind, though it “wrings [the sea] in the slush/Of this old Quaker Graveyard,” does not have the power to bring the “Sailor” back, either. ‘Skunk Hour’ by Robert Lowell was written in 1957 and published in the volume, Life Studies, one of Lowell’s most important works.The poem is made up of eight sestets, or six line stanzas.These stanzas do not conform to a particular rhyme scheme, but there are moments of … The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket study guide contains a biography of Robert Lowell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. “Sailor, you were glad/And whistled Sion by that stream,” the speaker says. Section IV begins with the line, “This is the end.” The chase for the whale is over, as it has led the sailors to their death. You could cut the air above the Atlantic open like a tree trunk and find rings from the beginning of time, when God formed man from the sea. ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ was first published in Lowell’s 1946 collection Lord Weary’s Castle. The image of being “poured out like water” suggests that existence is ephemeral. As the poem is a mourning poem on the death of Lowell’s cousin Warren Winslow, it can be taken as an example of elegy: it has all the necessary elements for the elegy. Since then it has become quite popular and influential. Though the poem, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, like other pastoral elegies, mourns the death of a single person, Warren Winslow, poet’s own maternal cousin; it also contains universal themes of death, love, crime and violence, sin and punishment, God and religion, loss of human values and virtues. He uses religious imagery to emphasize each description. The Nantucket Historical Association preserves and interprets the history of Nantucket through its programs, collections, and properties, in order to promote the island’s significance and foster an appreciation of it among all audiences. The bird’s wings are personified and describe the screaming out for the drowned sailor. This pattern shifts slightly in the second section but maintains a feeling of rhyme throughout. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” uses the occasion of a relative’s untimely death to cobble together a poem asserting that humanity’s decimation of nature and humankind’s self-destruction in war are affronts to a ever-present Judeo-Christian God, who may forgive, but cannot forget. Indeed many of the lines in this poem follow iambic pentameter, but many of them break it, sometimes because they are enjambed to retain the rhyme scheme. This alludes to the theme of death which is run throughout the entire poem as well as the end of the whaling industry which so marked societal and cultural norms in this area of the eastern United States. They are made glad by this “castle of God“. The first line of every stanza follows suit, with the exception of the line, “This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale,” which adds an extra syllable but still retains iambs. In the next lines and speaker references the valley of judgment, in Hebrew, the Jehoshaphat. The longest are twenty-six and twenty-four lines and are found in sections one and three. In the final lines of the section, Lowell alludes to the fact that many sailors have died at sea. The latter was tied to a ship, to the mass, in order to save him from the calling sirens. They “beat up on the stones“ for the speaker’s cousin. If the whale is Christ, are those who died pursuing it —like Ahab, and the whaling Quakers—righteous and saved, or are they doomed for attempting to defy nature? Despite the fact that this secret cannot be discovered, people continue to come to the shrine seeking it out. Robert Lowell. Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East. We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously. Seaward. There is an interesting transition in the seventeenth line of the section when the speaker describes the “monster“. The next few lines of ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’  contain several vocabulary words that are connected to the design of sailing ships. For example, the words “drowned” and “drag-net” in line four and “bloodless” and “botch” in line eight of the first stanza. She’s found something that is not revealed to anyone else. There are also references to other works of literature such as those by writers such as Henry Thoreau. Emma graduated from East Carolina University with a BA in English, minor in Creative Writing, BFA in Fine Art, and BA in Art Histories. He’s whistling the tune about “Sion,” referenced in Psalms 2:6. Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god. Ahab and this dead sailor inhabit the same water, and these drowned men are no doubt a reference to the true subject of the poem, Lowell’s cousin, who died at sea during World War II. The fourth section is the first to appear in two stanzas. The speaker describes the sounds of guns firing in a salute on a ship. They are, the speaker describes how the penitent ones came and took off their shoes begging for forgiveness. The verses conform to the rhyme scheme of aabbccdd, alternating end sounds from stanza to stanzas as Lowell saw fit. Every single person that visits PoemAnalysis.com has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. Lowell makes a new reference to the story of Bluebeard. Analysis, meaning and summary of Robert Lowell's poem The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. Lost Quaker Cemetery The first Quaker, or Friends, Burial Ground occupied one acre near the south end of Maxcey’s Pond and was used for interments from about 1711 until 1760. He asked the sailor rhetorically if he can hear the sounds of the Pequod. It might come as no surprise that, in a poem titled "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," most of the poem actually takes place—wait for it—in a Quaker graveyard in Nantucket. No one is foolish enough to ask anything of it; instead, the ship fires its guns in a “hoarse salute.” Even gunfire is nothing to the ocean. Subscribe to our mailing list and get new poetry analysis updates straight to your inbox. Throughout the seven sections of the poem, the poet depicts the power of the ocean and humanity’s inability to exert any kind of control over it. The first image in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is hellish but clear. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Will created Poem Analysis back in 2015 and has a team of the best poetry experts helping him analyse poems from the past and present. Something was lost when they died; but the speaker does not explain what it is that has been lost beyond calling it a “secret.” The speaker sees and hears the Quakers praise God for saving them; this is belied by the clear fact that he has not saved them. By ending the poem on this line, Lowell forces the readers to question God as he does. ... Get more Poetry Analysis like this in your inbox. Between 1704 and 1708, a number of other Friends visited Nantucket from Rhode Island, Long Island, Philadelphia, and England. The winds are moving and the waves are bashing against the “bulwarks of this pier“. The speaker does not clarify whether the Sailor is joining in the massacre or letting it happen. ‘Skunk Hour’ by Robert Lowell was written in 1957 and published in the volume, Life Studies, one of Lowell’s most important works.The poem is made up of eight sestets, or six line stanzas.These stanzas do not conform to a particular rhyme scheme, but there are moments of … One way to interpret the “combers” is as waves that kill men at God’s will; if the combers are in fact men doing God’s will, however, it would imply that God has made mankind violent and that they are unable to resist those impulses. This line conveys the uselessness of grief. Hide. The third stanza begins like this, referring to what Lowell’s cousin “recovered” from Poseidon as “harrowed brine” that is then useless against the ocean. Robert Lowell. Robert Lowell employs a multitude of harsh sounds, broken rhythms, and recurring patterns of alliteration to reflect the poem's preoccupation with the violence and turbulence of the world it depicts. The graveyard could very well be a reference to the water itself and the many dead who lie within it. His eyes stared open like “deadlights“. He describes an “old Quaker graveyard” drenched in water from the ocean, where the dead bodies cry out in sympathy for whale wounded in the hunt. What's your thoughts? What's your thoughts? The tide is flowing out and getting low. There’s an interesting bit of dialogue at the edge of the section where the speaker relays the words of the Quakers who drowned. The poet describes a “death rattle“, the noise that a living thing makes right before it dies. Robert Lowell. Lowell likens them to the corruption that “overruns this world.” The speaker asks the sailor if his sword will “whistle and fall and sink into the fat,” and then watches and describes the whale being cut to pieces. Yet that emptiness is godliness, or close to the speaker's perception of God. If someone enters into the afterlife, into the waves, there’s no way to bring them back. Lowell makes this connection to death literal by referring to the “death-rattle of the crabs.” He says, “This is the end of running on the waves;/We are poured out like water.” He seems to refer to his cousin, or perhaps Ahab the captain, when he mentions a “master of Leviathans” lashed to the mast of his ship, and speaks of the futility of trying to “dance” him up from his grave. The second stanza focuses in on a “you,” who seems to be Winslow, the character who has died. 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