Bobby Delano
Bobby Delano - meaning Summary
Memory of Adolescent Violence
Lowell's poem is a compressed recollection of a schoolmate, Bobby Delano, whose privilege and cruelty mark the speaker's youth. It links gilded privilege, athletic accolade, and brutal hazing: Delano forces the speaker to insult his mother, is expelled at fifteen, is seen drunken aboard the presidential yacht, and later shoots himself in Rio. The poem dwells on how that corrosive memory's light persists into adulthood.
Read Complete AnalysesThe labor to breathe that younger, rawer air: St. Mark’s last football game with Groton lost on the ice-crust, the sunlight gilding the golden polo coats of boys with country seats on the Upper Hudson. Why does that stale light stay? First Form hazing, first day being sent on errands by an oldboy, Bobby Delano, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – deported soused off the Presidential yacht baritoning You’re the cream in my coffee… his football, hockey, baseball letter at 15; at 15, expelled. He dug my ass with a compass, forced me to say “My mother is a whore. My freshman year, he shot himself in Rio, odious, unknowable, inspired as Ajax.
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