Home After Three Months Away

Lowell’s poem qualifies as a lyric and a narrative. It’s the latter because it tells the story of a man returning home and trying to adapt to his regular life. It’s also a lyric because it’s short and centers on the personal perceptions and feelings of Lowell, the poem’s speaker. Lowell’s situation and his mental health experiences inform the poem. These are his experiences, so he is the voice of the poem and, thus, the speaker. Even if a reader comes to the poem without much information about Lowell’s biography, the work provides a clue that Lowell is the speaker when someone asks, “Is Richard now himself again?” (Line 11).

At the same time, it’s important to remember that Lowell, the speaker in this poem, isn’t the same as Lowell, the person outside the poem. The speaker is a literary device, so Lowell creates a poetic persona based on his life, but it’s not interchangeable with his life. “Home After Three Months Away” is a poem; it’s a creation of Lowell’s poetic sensibilities. When Lowell mentions “the Mother” in Line 3 or his daughter in Stanza 2, he’s not providing an objective, dispassionate account of Elizabeth Hardwick or Harriet. He turns them into characters, much like how he turns himself into a character—and they become vessels for his art.

At first, the tone is direct as Lowell states, “Gone now the baby’s nurse” (Line 1). Lowell is back, but the nurse is not there. Lowell describes the nurse as fierce and predatory. She’s a “lioness who ruled the roost / and made the Mother cry” (Lines 2-3). Lowell uses the literary device known as alliteration when he places words beginning with the same letter next to each other: “ruled” and “roost”; “made” and “Mother.” The alliteration creates a melodious tone and conveys the bestial, domineering characteristics of the nurse, who controlled the house (“roost”) and brought Hardwick to tears.

The tone becomes reminiscent in Line 4, as Lowell details a memory about the nurse that reinforces her animal-like disposition. The memory links to the literary device known as imagery since Lowell uses precise language to create a vivid picture. The nurse “used to tie / gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze” (Lines 4-5). For three months, the lumps of pigskin “hung like soggy toasts” (Line 6) on the Lowells’ “eight foot magnolia tree” (Line 7). The food “helped the English sparrows / weather a Boston winter” (Lines 8-9). The memory begins with a visceral tone but ends compassionately. The nuanced presentation of the porkrind is grotesque, but the act of placing the porkrind is a kind gesture and reveals a different, less severe side of the nurse.

Stanza 2 starts with a frenzied tone. There’s a chant: “Three months, three months!” (Line 10). Someone then asks, “Is Richard now himself again?” (Line 11). The tone puzzles; it’s not obvious who cries “three months” or wonders about the state of Lowell or Richard’s personality. The fragmented, excited tone pulls Lowell to his daughter who’s “[d]impled with exaltation” (Line 12) and “holds her levee in the tub” (Line 13). The notes to Robert Lowell’s Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, p. 365) define “levee” as a “reception held by an eminent person rising from bed.” Thus, the tone is playful since the august reception doesn’t occur in a palatial space but a bathroom. Greeting one another in the bathroom, Lowell and his daughter rub their noses and pat a “stringy lock of hair” (Line 15).

The playful tone grows melancholy when Lowell says, “[T]hey tell me nothing’s gone” (Line 16). Lowell confronts loss. People—it’s unclear who—assure Lowell nothing has left. Yet Lowell doesn’t seem sure, which is why he says “[t]hey.” Other people tell Lowell that he has nothing to be sad about as nothing has departed. If the speaker Lowell felt free of melancholy, he likely wouldn’t need someone else to tell him that everything’s all right.

The theme of time arrives when Lowell notes his age in Lines 17 and 18. He’s 41, not 40, which indicates that between leaving and coming back, he had a birthday and became a year older. Lowell treats the passage of time flippantly, referring to it as “child’s play” (Line 19). The term is ironic since it appears with Lowell’s daughter in the bathtub. It mixes Lowell’s mental health with his child’s bath time. There are multiple meanings, and some of those meanings are unexpected—ironic.

Lines 19-27 also address the theme of time and change. Lowell has been gone for “thirteen weeks” (Line 19), yet his child “still dabs her cheeks” (Line 20) to encourage Lowell to shave. Some things have stayed the same as the daughter continues to touch her cheeks. Yet when Lowell and Hardwick “dress her in her sky-blue corduroy” (Line 22), the daughter changes “to a boy” (Line 23). Lowell’s shaving products change, too, as they wind up “in the flush” (Line 25) or, presumably, toilet. Lowell briefly transforms into an animal as he has to “loiter here / in lather like a polar bear” (Lines 26-27). This is an example of a simile, since Lowell compares himself to a polar bear with the word “like.”

In Line 28, Lowell says, “Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.” The tone is lethargic. Lowell wants to recover, so he’s not active. He’s not moving around or working. “Three stories down below” (Line 29), the choreman is working on the “coffin’s length of soil” (Line 30), and the deathly word “coffin” adds to the gloomy tone that occurs throughout the poem. The melancholy tone continues with the “seven horizontal tulips” (Line 31) since “horizontal” suggests the tulips are flat.

Once again, Lowell reminiscences: “Just twelve months ago, / these flowers were pedigreed” (Lines 32-33). They were distinguished flowers or “imported Dutchmen” (Line 34). Now, it’s hard to tell the flowers apart “from weed” (Line 35). The fall of the flowers furthers the sad tone and continues the theme of time and loss. Due to the “late spring snow,” the flowers are “bushed” (Line 36) or exhausted, and they therefore “cannot meet” (Line 37) or confront “another year’s snowball enervation” (Line 38) or more inhospitable weather.

The waylaid flowers lead Lowell to make a statement about himself: “I keep no rank nor station,” says the speaker (Line 39). The tone is meek and self-deprecating, as Lowell refuses to attach himself to status. He says that he’s “[c]ured” (Line 40), but he seems sad and glum. The words “frizzled, stale and small” (Line 40) suggest a weary person and not a person on the path toward getting well, so the poem concludes with a weakened speaker and a discouraging tone.