The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is an influential poem by Robert Lowell. It was first published in 1946 in his collection ''

Lord Weary's Castle ''Lord Weary's Castle'', Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publi ...

''. The poem is written in an irregular combination of pentameter and trimeter and divided into seven sections. It is dedicated to Lowell's cousin, "Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea." According to the Notes in Lowell's ''Collected Poems'', "The body of Warren Winslow . . .was never recovered after his Navy destroyer, ''Turner'', sank from an accidental explosion in New York harbor during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

Content

Section I describes the discovery, by a fleet of warships, of a sailor's corpse at sea on the North Atlantic "off Madaket" (which is a harbor on

Nantucket Island Nantucket () is an island about south from Cape Cod. Together with the small islands of Tuckernuck and Muskeget, it constitutes the Town and County of Nantucket, a combined county/town government that is part of the U.S. state of Massachuse ...

) and its reburial with military honours, ending with the gun salute. It also makes the first reference to

Herman Melville Herman Melville ( born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are ''Moby-Dick'' (1851); ''Typee'' (1846), a rom ...

Moby-Dick ''Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'' is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship ''Pequod'', for revenge against Moby Dick, the giant whi ...

, specifically to the fictional character

Captain Ahab Captain Ahab is a fictional character and one of the main protagonists in Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' (1851). He is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship ''Pequod''. On a previous voyage, the white whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg, ...

. Throughout the poem, Lowell uses the fate of the fictional Pequod, the whaling ship in Moby Dick, as a metaphor for the fate of Warren Winslow and his fellow Navy crewmen of the ''Turner'' during World War II. Section II introduces the Quaker graveyard in Nantucket and Lowell's cousin, and Lowell continues to elaborate his

metaphor in this section. Section III muses on the death of his cousin and on the dying thoughts and beliefs of the Quaker sailors buried there. Lowell also cryptically references Moby-Dick as "IS, the whited monster" which the critic Hugh Staples interprets as a comparison of the whale with God.Bidart, Frank and David Gewanter. "Notes." Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003. Section IV continues to mix the narrative of the sinking of Winslow's ship, the ''Turner'', and the deaths of its crew, with the sinking of the ''Pequod'' and the deaths of its crew. In Section V, Lowell uses the imagery of whale-hunting which he compares with religious sacrifice. Section VI (separately titled '

Our Lady of Walsingham Our Lady of Walsingham is a title of Mary, mother of Jesus venerated by Catholics, Western Rite Orthodox Christians, and some Anglicans associated with the Marian apparitions to Richeldis de Faverches, a pious English noblewoman, in 1061 in t ...

') makes the religious subtext of some of the previous sections more explicit, invoking a pilgrimage to the saint's shrine in Norfolk, England. He also makes a passing reference to his cousin, Warren Winslow. In last section of the poem, Section VII Lowell returns to the Nantucket graveyard and imagines the Atlantic Ocean "fouled with the blue sailors,/ Sea monsters, upward angel, downward fish." Lowell ends the poem musing on humankind's origins as having evolved from the "sea's slime," and the biblical irony that the same ocean from which God "breathed into his face the breathe of life" is where sailors often die. Then Lowell ends the poem with the famously ambiguous line, "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will."

References

Works by Robert Lowell 1946 poems American poems {{1940s-poem-stub