History
History - meaning Summary
Death Resists Narrative Closure
Lowell's poem contrasts the unresolved continuity of death and history with the closure of writing. It insists that history lives with what remains, making dying dull, gruesome, and ongoing rather than neatly finished. Biblical reference to Abel gives a moral frame while stark images—cows as skulls, a moon like a child’s face—render mortality immediate. The speaker’s frost-washed self embodies stunned, innocent survival amid lingering death.
Read Complete AnalysesHistory has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends-- a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose-- O there's a terrifying innocence in my face drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.
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