'Home After Three Months Away' is one of several "confessional" poems by Robert Lowell which appeared in his book ''

Life Studies ''Life Studies'' is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics (including Helen Vendler, Steven Gould Axelrod, Adam Kirsch, and others) consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it ...

''.

Background

The poem was written after Lowell started returning home for weekends from the

McLean Hospital McLean Hospital () (formerly known as Somerville Asylum and Charlestown Asylum) is a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It is noted for its clinical staff expertise and neuroscience research and is also known for the large number of ...

, where he was being treated for mental illness, in Belmont,

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

in early

1958 Events January * January 1 – The European Economic Community (EEC) comes into being. * January 3 – The West Indies Federation is formed. * January 4 ** Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition completes the third ...

. Lowell was finally released from McLean in June 1959. Ian Hamilton, who wrote a biography on Lowell, suggests that the poem owes something to W.D. Snodgrass' poem " Heart's Needle" since "Heart's Needle," which came out prior to ''Life Studies'', focused on Snodgrass' relationship with his child. Although "Home After Three Months Away" is really about Lowell's struggle to recover from a mental breakdown, the narrative of the poem focuses on his relationship with his daughter, Harriet.

Content

He begins the poem by noting the absence of his daughter's former caretaker; then he describes his interactions with his daughter as he's bathing her. But by the end of the poem, he is focused on the subject of his fragile mental state which he compares to the flowers in the garden: "Bushed by the late spring snow,/ they cannot meet/ another year's snowballing enervation." Lowell concludes the poem with the line, "Cured, I am frizzled, stale, and small."Lowell, Robert. "Home After Three Months Away." ''Life Studies''. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1959. The line implies that the treatments he received at McLean Hospital left him feeling worse.

References

* Hamilton, Ian, ''Robert Lowell: A Biography'', Random House, New York, 1982. .

Footnotes

{{poem-stub American poems Works by Robert Lowell 1958 poems