Analysis of Memories Of West Street And Lepke
Robert Lowell 1917 (Boston) – 1977 (New York City)
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections....
Scheme | AABCDXCEFFG XHAXIIBG XJJXKKXDXEXXXEXX XXCXAAAAXDEHCHXGGB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10101111 001011010110 11011110 101001001 11001 10010011011 1110011001 01010100 1101110 10111110 101110001010101 110110 011101110111 1101010101 0111010 1010101001 110100011 01010111 1010011 1001 111011011101 010111101 0101010101 11010100 01010100 101101010100 010101101 011100 10100 1111001101 11110101 01011110 10100010 101010101 1111011101 1111111101 10010100 1101110101 1110101 1110101 010101101 110010011 11010101 1101111010011 1110010101 010010010110100 1101010101101 1011 11000101 111000010 11010100101 1011010011 11010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,917 |
Words | 340 |
Sentences | 20 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 11, 8, 16, 18 |
Lines Amount | 53 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 385 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 82 |
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Submitted on August 03, 2020
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:42 min read
- 18 Views
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"Memories Of West Street And Lepke" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 3 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/56523/memories-of-west-street-and-lepke>.
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