The Exile's Return

Lord Weary’s Castle (1946)

The Exile’s Return

There mounts in squalls a sort of rusty mire,Not ice, not snow, to leaguer the H™telDe Ville, where braced pig-iron dragons gripThe blizzard to their rigor mortis. A bellGrumbles when the reverberations stripThe thatching from its spire,The search-guns click and spit and split up timberAnd nick the slate roofs on the HolstenwallWhere torn-up tilestones crown the victor. FallAnd winter, spring and summer, guns unlimberAnd lumber down the narrow gabled streetPast your gray, sorry and ancestral houseWhere the dynamited walnut treeShadows a squat, old, wind-torn gate and cowsThe Yankee commandant. You will not seeStrutting children or meetThe peg-leg and reproachful chancellorWith a forget-me-not in his button-holeWhen the unseasoned liberators rollInto the Market Square, ground arms beforeThe Rathaus ; but already lily-standsBurgeon the risen Rhineland, and a roughCathedral lifts its eye. Pleasant enough,Voi chÕentrate , and your life is in your hands.

(Lord WearyÕs Castle, 1946)

1Robert Lowell publicly expressed that he was inspired by Thomas Mann’s novel Tonio Kršger (Kršger’s dream return to LŸbeck) in the writing of this poem: “From Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kršger and it’s…about a German coming back…maybe a German Jewish refugee coming to Germany after it’s been blasted to pieces…I was very religious then…I am still but I hide it…then, I didn’t” (words from his last reading at the YMHA in New York, 1976). At the same time, the title makes reference to Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1934), with a significative subtitle that runs “A Literary Odyssey of the 1920’s”. It is a book that explores the development of literature in the early twentieth century. This work includes Cowley’s own personal experience and relationships with many writers from the start of the century. It chronicles the general movement out of America after the Great War, and then back again in the 1920’s. The writers who experienced this movement have been labeled under the well known term “The Lost Generation”.

Two important intertextual references are worth noting here as well: Dante’s Inferno, and Pound’s Cantos. Divine Comedy is a long allegorical poem in three parts (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) and 100 cantos describing the poet’s journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. It was a major model for Pound’s poetic sequence. In his 1928 essay, “How to Read”, Pound lists Dante among the inventors, or poets who were responsible for introducing something to the art that had never been done before.