Epilogue

The opening line of “Epilogue” follows the form and tone of older, more traditional English poetry. The straightforward, measured iambic rhythm and archaic diction accomplish this reference on their own, but Lowell ensures the effect lands by calling almost comical attention to the traditionalism in the opening line by accenting the final syllable in “blessèd” (Line 1). Of course, the “blessèd structures, plot and rhyme” (Line 1) give way to the informal and arhythmic question: “why are they no help to me now” (Line 2)? The poem here performs a kind of false start, a tongue-in-cheek traditional opening that collapses under the poet’s pressing and honest personal questioning.

The question which presses on the speaker is why the features of prosody offer “no help to [him]” (Line 2) as he attempts to write a poem that is “imagined, not recalled” (Line 4). The importance of this question to the speaker’s artistic practice is highlighted by the notably short third line, “I want to make,” which summarizes the impetus of the poem in miniature (Line 3).

After the opening quatrain—a single sentence which defines the rhetorical direction of the poem—the speaker of the poem turns to reflection. In his reflection it is his own words which come to the speaker, “the noise of [his] own voice” (Line 5). The speaker remembers a statement he made about the nature of art, that the “painter’s vision is not a lens” (Line 6). Instead, the painter’s vision is an active and creative participant in the act of sensing. For Lowell, the artist may reproduce what he sees but the art is in the seeing, which is not an activity of objective recording but one of co-creation.

However, he doubts whether he is able to replicate this artistic seeing in his own work. The speaker feels that “sometimes everything [he] write[s] / … seems a [mere] snapshot” (Lines 9, 10). Instead of his vision “trembl[ing] to caress the light” (Line 7), Lowell finds his eye producing “threadbare art” (Line 9). Instead of sensuous artistry, the speaker “sometimes” (Line 8) finds his work to be “garish” (Line 11), “heightened from life, / yet paralysed [sic] by fact” (Lines 12, 13). The implication is that Lowell is searching for a poetry that does not simply report or describe “recalled” (Line 4) experience, that is not frozen “by fact” (Line 12). Instead, he vainly quests for an “imagined” (Line 4) poetry that creates without being bound by the facts of lived experience. Lowell concludes this line of despairing with another archaic phrase, recalling a Shakespearian style: “All’s misalliance” (Line 14). This two-word line sums up the unfruitful search of the speaker to write “something imagined” (Line 4).

Instead of lingering on his poetic failure, the speaker switches rhetorical angles after his heightened sigh of resignation in Line 14. Lowell now asks, “Yet why not say what happened” (Line 15)? Instead of continuing to seek an imagined poetry, Lowell decides to defend his documentarian poetic practices to himself. On cue, he finds a new model for this kind of artist practice: the famous Dutch Baroque painter Johannes Vermeer. The speaker “pray[s] for the grace of accuracy” (Line 16) that Vermeer demonstrates when he makes art out of what he sees. The speaker has abandoned his desire to “make / something imagined, not recalled” (Lines 3, 4) and instead seeks to hone the “threadbare art of [his] eye” (Line 9) into a more graceful accuracy.

As Lowell describes the art of Vermeer’s visual documentation, he demonstrates what its poetic corollary might look like. It is not simply the light that Vermeer paints, but “the sun’s illumination / stealing like the tide across a map” (Lines 17, 18). The poetic image of the light is expressed with “grace,” (Line 16) and Line 18’s expression in bold but measured trochaic pentameter cement the use of poetic craft to document phenomena. In this way, the speaker’s prayer has been at least partially answered—the poem transforms into what it now aspires to be, a work of art that crafts beauty out of observation.

In addition to performing the type of art he is describing, Lowell also emphasizes the personal nature of observation. The poem’s exemplary artist Vermeer captures the light as it touches “his girl solid with yearning” (Line 19). The image of Vermeer may concern light, but it concludes with a human element. Crucially, Lowell describes the painter’s model as “his girl” (Line 19): the personal pronoun making the artistic process personal, almost sexual. This personalization becomes more significant in light of Lowell’s Confessional approach to poetry and, specifically, about his romantic life.

However, that the Vermeer image finishes with the artist’s model does not only serve to emphasize the intimately personal element of artistic documentation. Lowell’s focus on the human also speaks to the subjective, human—and ultimately, relational—features inherent to any observation. The model appears not just as a “girl,” but as one “solid with yearning” (Line 19). The model’s existence is made real, made “solid” (Line 19), by her intimate and internal human experience of “yearning” (Line 19). This focus on humanity prefigures the poem’s concluding quatrain, which ties the documentarian theme together with the human.

The final sentence spans the last four lines of the poem, and it opens with the text’s first use of a third person pronoun (“We”) (Line 20). This pronoun is significant largely because it is the first time the reader is included in the poem, which has heretofore been a personal reflection on the part of the poet. Now the poem is personal to the reader as well who, like the poet, is a “poor passing fact” (Line 20).

Aside from the shock of sudden inclusion, the reader is presented with a confluence of the poet’s struggle with documentarian artistic praxis and Lowell’s understanding of what it is to be human. As human beings, “we are…facts” (Line 20); we exist in the world. This existence is tempered by its “poor passing” (Line 20) nature—that is, humans face mortality and death. For Lowell, our reality and its temporary nature work together to “warn[ ]…[us] to give / each figure… / his living name” (Lines 21, 22, 23). The “photograph” full of nameable figures recalls the “art of [the poet’s] eye / seem[ing] a snapshot” (Lines 9, 10), serving perhaps as a metaphor for the act of seeing and experiencing in general. The image of the photograph also initially minimizes the humanity of the figures in question, framing them as simply elements of a vision. However, the intimate forces of mortality and reality discussed earlier in the poem come together for the poet (and, according to the “We” (Line 20), the reader as well) to create the human urge to give “living name[s]” (Line 23).

The poem concludes with this act of naming, and it is by design that the final line contains only the words “his living name” (23). In addition to the name are two words: the personal and specific pronoun “he” and the breathing, bodied “living” (Line 23). These two opening words emphasize the embodied, human nature of naming and documenting that Lowell’s poem has worked toward concluding. The act of writing which bucked against its own documentarian nature in the first stanza now finds peace in the very human act it once resisted. The “painter’s vision is not a lens” (Line 6) at the poem’s end because any act of artistic vision is an act of tenderness by nature in Lowell’s estimation. In fact, the act of “naming” is so fundamental to being human that it elevates mere “figure[s] in [a] photograph” (Line 22) to “living” beings (Line 23). The speaker’s conflict at the beginning of the poem is rendered moot because Lowell has concluded that there is no need to seek a poem “imagined, not recalled” (Line 4). For Lowell, a poem of recollection is already a poem of imagination, already a poem infused with art and intimacy.