New Year 1970
New Year 1970 - meaning Summary
Love's Tarnish and Reckoning
Lowell's speaker returns from a late, drunken outing and meditates on a damaged marriage. He imagines eternal life still too short to remove a persistent tarnish, casts mythic gods as blunt punishers of husbands, and addresses his partner with sharply mixed affection and reproach. Recalling the early blindness of courtship, he suggests that regret, chance, and moral error have made reconciliation unlikely. The closing questions imply resignation rather than hopeful renewal.
Read Complete AnalysesBy miracle, I left the party half an hour behind you, reached home five hours drunker…. To live a million years, and a million years longer than the gods on Olympus or Jutland would be too short to polish up this tarnish. The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands, have no eye for trigger-fine distinctions; their myopia makes all error mortal. My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the hearth, chocolates, cherries, hairshirt, pinks and glass- when we drank in the first blindness of courtship, loving lost half its vice with all its virtue. Who wants a second life and two more wives? Cards will never be dealt us fairly again.
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