We drowned in Eden

This weekend the weather finally broke from its wet, gray, cold, hunker-down-and-use-your-umbrella-as-a-shield streak. Yesterday, a friend and I went to sit in the Public Garden and do homework, and pretty much the whole city--from bridal couples to anti-war protesters--was out, just so glad not to be wearing coats or huddling. Even though this poem is about this "drowning in Eden" eventually ending, I was reminded of it yesterday, and how much I love it. I wrote a (mediocre) paper about it in college, in which I talked about the tension between motion and motionlessness. I'm definitely feeling that tension lately, both in a day-to-day sense and a bigger life sense. Birthdays will do that to you, I suppose. Anyway, here's your latest National Poetry month installment. (I should probably post a poem next that doesn't belong to this particular generation of poets, just for variety. Stand by for updates.)

The Public Garden by Robert Lowell

Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All’s alive—
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain, where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets. Night
deepens. From the arched bridge, we see
the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep
circling and diving in the lantern light,
searching for something hidden in the muck.
And now the moon, earth’s friend, the cared so much
for us, and cared so little, comes again—
always a stranger! As we walk,
it lies like chalk
over the waters. Everything’s aground.
Remember summer? Bubbles filled
the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden, while Jehovah’s grass-green lyre
was rustling all about us in the leaves
that gurgled by us, turning upside down. . .
The fountain’s failing waters flash around
the garden. Nothing catches fire.


Text taken from Poets of Cambridge.