Leafing through a volume of Robert Lowell’s poetry not long ago, I came across some lines that I couldn’t help reading over and over. They were from “Waking Early Sunday Morning” (1967), and they ran this way:
Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war — until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.
I was taken by the artistry of the lines, by their subtlety and their melancholy…
