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Dry Stick. As for Lowell himself, greater things can surely be expected, considering his high conception of the scope and power of art. That conception is best expressed in the words he found for Prometheus, as the embodiment of man's creative faculties, which are reflections of the divine. / taught men the rising and the setting of the stars. From the stars, I taught them numbers. I taught women to count their children, and men to number their murders. I gave them the alphabet. Before I made men talk and write with words, knowledge dropped like a dry stick into the fire of their memories, fed that fading blaze an instant, then died without leaving an ash behind.
Lowell remains a religious man and maintains that his later poems, in which explicit Christian symbols rarely occur, are more truly religious than those of his Catholic period, which were encrusted with liturgical ornament.
With all his poet's pride, he remains humble and aware that the end of man, even of poetic man, is not poetry but the simple obligation to be good. He has constantly said, "It is harder to be a good man than a good poet." The statement comes with double force from a poet who has undergone such an intense struggle to acquire his art and from a man whose own nature is in frequent schism with itself. Thus far, his art has found no words for this. His fellow poet Auden might speak for him in lines written on another New England poet-tragedian, Herman Melville:
Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it.