Waking in the Blue

Life Studies (1959)

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore2,rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy headpropped on The Meaning of Meaning3.He catwalks4 down our corridor.Azure daymakes my agonized blue window bleaker.Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.Absence! My hearts grows tenseas though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.(“This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

What use is my sense of humour?I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,once a Harvard all-American fullback,(if such were possible!)still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,as he soaks, a ramrod5with a muscle of a sealin his long tub,vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,worn all day, all night,he thinks only of his figure,of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale—more cut off from words than a seal.This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s6;the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,“Porcellian ‘297,a replica of Louis XVIwithout the wig—redolent and roly-poly8 as a sperm whale,as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suitand horses at chairs.These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.In between the limits of day,hours and hours go by under the crew haircutsand slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkleof the Roman Catholic attendants.(There are no Mayflowerscrewballs9 in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,I weigh two hundred poundsthis morning. Cock of the walk,I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jerseybefore the metal shaving mirrors,and see the shaky future grow familiarin the pinched, indigenous facesof these thoroughbred mental cases,twice my age and half my weight.We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.

Life Studies, 1959

1”Waking in the Blue” is a modified version of a previous poem bearing a long title: “To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean’s Mental Hospital)”. It may be considered as a first draft of this poem published in Life Studies. It makes reference to the first week experience at McLean. It seems that several lines that Lowell dropped from this earlier poem deal with his affair with Anne Adden. These lines will be recovered for the poem “1958” published in Near the Ocean (1967), and “Mania”, published in Notebook 1967-68.

2Second year student at Boston University.

3Ogden, C. K. and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism. New York, 1932. It is considered the theoretical starting point for the New Criticism.

4The way how ‘fashion models’ walk.

5Ramrod: a rod for ramming down a charge or for cleaning a gun-barrel: a stern, inflexible person: a strict, disciplinarian.

6McLean: name for the hospital in Waverley, Massachusetts (near Boston). The venerable psychiatric institution just outside Boston opened its doors in 1817, and by the start of the Civil War, it was treating a specialty clientele: the “Mayflower screwballs.”

7A member of one of the private societies for Harvard students. This is a reference to a student from the promotion of year 29.

8Round, podgy.

9The mentally ill members of Boston society.