My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow by Robert Lowell

First published: 1959, in Life Studies

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” is a richly autobiographical poem of 152 lines, divided into four parts. The shortest part is an eleven-line description of the poet at only five-and-a-half, dressed in a sailor blouse; the longest parts (I and IV) are about fifty lines each and narrate an account of Robert Lowell’s memory of a young uncle, who was shortly to die of Hodgkin’s disease. Lowell’s Life Studies volume (1959), to which this poem makes a significant contribution, contains many clearly rendered portraits of the poet and his extended, old-moneyed family. These poems mark a turning away from the well-wrought, high modernist poems of Lowell’s youth to personal, unguarded, and even “confessional” poems, as they were called by early critics. The later poems came out of Lowell’s battles with mental illness, his brief imprisonment as a conscientious objector, his difficulties in love and marriage, and his rich memories of the Bostonian Lowells and Winslows. In this poem, the portrait of three Winslow generations—grandparents, parents, and child—is wonderfully restrained, at times charming, and finally disturbing.

After the title there stands a caption: “1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house.” Part I has several verse paragraphs devoted to this setting. The small child, Robert, is sitting on his grandfather Winslow’s porch; nearby, a tenant farmer has placed a pile of earth and lime in preparation for mixing cement for a root-house. This is a working farm, but it is also a Winslow family retreat. The child came here often, and the adult narrator remembers almost every collected item on his grandfather’s porch. There is an alley of poplars, a rose garden, a stand of pine beyond the house. Lowell remembers huge sunflowers, as big as pumpkins, and two maids bringing out iced tea and other cold drinks on this particular afternoon.

In part II, Lowell recalls that he was wearing new pearl-gray shorts from the finest children’s store in Boston. The poem moves “up” in part III, as a camera might, to show the windows of the billiards room, behind which the child could see his “Great Aunt Sarah” practicing on a keyboard. Lowell’s grandmother could barely tolerate Sarah’s practicing; she would rather play cards. In the second paragraph of this section, Lowell shares some old family gossip: Aunt Sarah not only tried and failed to become a concert pianist, but she also broke off an important engagement—she “jilted an Astor.”

The long last section (part IV) returns briefly to the vantage point of young Robert, now imagining himself taken up high above the farm; he can look down on the small ponds and see his uncle Devereux’s duck blind and, beyond that, his hunting cabin, which is already boarded up—either because it is the end of summer or because of the uncle’s illness. He describes many of the collected items inside the cabin, which suggest much about the uncle’s coming of age before World War I. Lowell, in the long closing paragraph of this section and the poem itself, thinks of how terrified he was to be the child caught between the emotions he felt for both his beloved, overbearing grandfather and his handsome, doomed uncle, who suddenly comes to stand immediately behind the small boy. Devereux, ridiculously overdressed, is reflected in the same mirror used to give the boy an image of himself. Suddenly the young Lowell seems to have a vision of his uncle’s bright colors gone. The child has been sitting on the porch with his hands in black dirt and white lime, and the narrative ends abruptly in a portent of death: “Come winter,/ Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.”

Forms and Devices

The most common beat in spoken English is the iamb (a weak syllable followed by a strong syllable). The English language generally alternates its weak-strong stresses with great regularity. For this reason, modern poets such as Lowell can still be highly rhythmic even when they give up the conventions of regular meter. The term free verse, which is not to be mistaken for a total disregard for beats and counts, is fittingly applied to this poem. Free verse allows Lowell a conversational or intimate tone when he wishes and a freedom to make line breaks that group words more or less at will. In lines 24-33, for example, he gives each item on his grandfather’s porch its individual line. Then, in drastically shortening his conclusion (lines 34-35), he is able to drive home forcefully four telling adjectives to describe grandfather Winslow. The well-chosen words form a little stack which the eye takes in at once:

was manly, comfortable,overbearing, disproportioned.

Later, Lowell will use the same freedom to create surprises in rhyme and juxtapositioning. The effect is comic:

tilted her archaic Athenian noseand jilted an Astor.

The “archaic” modifies Athenian, but lands on top of the Astors. Much playfulness can come into the decisions that free verse demands and allows. Another example from the poem illustrates the decision-making typical of Lowell’s inventive line breaks:

A fluff of the west wind puffingmy blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys,troubling the waters.…

Lowell could have kept “my blouse” up with the previous line, but he would have lost some of the comic positioning of the fluff/ puff opening and closing of that line. Now “blouse,” by its closer proximity to its metaphor (kite), works quite independently of the previous line. Clearly the line about troubled waters, biblical in its nature, gathers strength by standing alone.

This loosely organized poem achieves a formal tightness by establishing early images that reappear in various ways. The child’s early reflection in a mirror later gives way to Devereux’s; the two images are inextricably tied to each other. The boy (“a stuffed toucan”) is overlayed with Devereux (as a brushed “riding horse,” “a blue jay,” “a ginger snap man,” a creamy layer “in the top of the bottle”). Reinforcing this notion of absurd, oppressive clothing are the moments in the poem which glimpse the Victorian poses and hairstyles in Devereux’s “almost life-size” posters.

The materials for the poem are mostly generated from the setting, and Lowell uses few allusions. The most important one is the allusion to the dissolution of Rome. Perhaps the fall of empires begins at home: “I was Agrippina/ in the Golden House of Nero. . . .” (The mother of Nero was put to death for her open opposition to her son’s personal decisions regarding divorce and remarriage.)

The Lowell family’s period pieces, their domestic quirks and habits—their card games, novels, hobbies, souvenirs, and mementos—provide the narrative material and the strong images for much of the poem. Lowell shows much more than he tells, but by so doing he tells much.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould, ed. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Cosgrave, Patrick. The Public Poetry of Robert Lowell. New York: Taplinger, 1970.

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

Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Perloff, Marjorie G. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Wallingford, Katherine. Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.