Happy Thanksgiving!

From Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.  Originally published in Lord Weary's Castle (1946)

Children of Light

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;

Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,

Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night;

They planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;

And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock

The riotous glass houses built on rock,

And candles gutter by an empty altar,

And light is where the landless blood of Cain

Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

CHILDREN OF LIGHT

“The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

1 “When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones” (Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” 4). “Stocks and stones is a little joke on Milton’s Piedmontese sonnet—it was the Catholics according to Milton who were idolators and worshipped stones” (Lowell, letter, June 26, 1967).  See also Jeremiah 2:26-27.

3 – 5 After a decade in Holland, many English Separatists (their beliefs derived from John Calvin of Geneva) sailed to Massachusetts on the Mayflower (1620); later they were called Pilgrims.

5 Serpent’s seeds: see note to “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” 5.2 (p.1022).

AT THE INDIAN KILLER’S GRAVE

5.2 the man who sowed: Like Cadmus who killed a dragon, then sowed its teeth from which an army sprang up.  The army fought until only five warriors survived; with these five Cadmus founded Thebes.

7 “Glass houses, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones etc. of the proverb—expensive houses later built by [a] plutocratic civilization with sea-views” (Lowell, letter, June 26, 1967).

9 Cain: Cain was forced by God to wander after killing his brother Abel (Genesis 14:12-14).