18 pages • 36 minutes read
Epilogue
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Themes
Representation
For all the poem’s bluster about seeking an “imagined, not recalled” art (Line 4), it doesn’t stray thematically far from an interest in representational poetry—and representational art in general. Even when the speaker first reflects on his struggle, he represents himself to himself by recalling his own words, writing “I hear the noise of my own voice” (Line 5). More generally speaking, the poem wrestles with the gap between “the threadbare /…snapshot” (Lines 9, 10) on the one hand and Vermeer’s “grace of accuracy” (Line 16) on the other. Lowell desires to create a poetry that represents his own experiences the way a master painter does, not in the manner of a casual photograph.
Lowell’s poem identifies a problem with representation, where the documenting of “fact” can “paralyse[ ] [sic]” the development of the artwork (Line 13). The speaker fears his own representational art may simply group together insignificant everyday experiences, creating only a “lurid, rapid, garish” (Line 11) “snapshot” (Line 10). Lowell’s speaker aspires to avoid this type of cheap “snapshot” (Line 10) representation by tempering his accuracy with grace, which he does by ensuring that his representation “trembles to caress the light” (Line 7).
The conclusion of the poem further emphasizes the representational theme. For Lowell, the impulse toward representation is an impulse toward the activity of life. Just as representation captures the simple facts of life, we ourselves are “poor passing facts” (Line 20) according to the poem. Additionally, the act of giving “living name[s]” (Line 23) to what beforehand are simply “figure[s] in [a] photograph” (Line 22) demonstrates the creative act at the heart of representing what is seen and experienced. For Lowell, to represent is not to simply reproduce but to breathe life into what is represented.
Mortality & Death
Lowell’s “Epilogue” draws a direct line between its interest in representation and mortality. To represent is also to preserve, and this preservation sets itself against the onslaught of time. Although this theme remains implicit for much of the poem, it becomes most explicit in the concluding quatrain. The act of giving “each figure in the photograph / his living name” (Lines 22-23) is precipitated by an important “warn[ing]” (Line 21). The syntax obfuscates the meaning of the line somewhat, with the subjects being “warned by that [emphasis added]” (Line 21), it is ultimately mortality which is responsible. People “are poor passing facts” (Line 20), and it is their status as facts which pass into death that warns each to represent, to name.
With this relationship between mortality and representation made explicit in the poem’s conclusion, earlier passages of the poem take on darker shades of meaning. The preceding image of Vermeer’s painting, with its light “stealing like the tied across a map / to his girl” (Lines 18, 19), can be read as an ominous tide of approaching mortality. After all, the map, the girl, and the artist captured in the painting have all since died or changed beyond recognition in the face of time’s tide. Even the urgency to create expressed in the first half of the poem feels aware of the limits of mortality. While it would be imprecise to read this drive to write as motivated solely by the approach of death, the connection between mortality and the urge to represent is far from absent in the poem.
Language
The poem’s interest in representation is expressed largely through its focus on visual art, particularly painting. This metonym for writing is effective in creating poetic imagery, made up as it is of visual features. However, the poem itself is a linguistic object, and its interest in representation is thought through more fundamentally in its implicit reflection on language.
As with several aspects of the poem, the final sentence makes the language theme explicit. Instead of remaining with the visual art metonym performed by the rest of the poem, Lowell shifts from “the photograph” (Line 22) to a linguistic act: giving each “his living name” (Line 23). Here, the act of naming (arguably the essential act of language) is shown to be a creative act, one where perception “trembles to caress” (Line 7) what it perceives as opposed to simply taking “a snapshot” (Line 10).
While the poem performs the “grace of accuracy” (Line 16) it praises in describing Vermeer’s similarly graceful representation, Lowell suggests an even deeper power belongs to language. Like painting, poetic language can represent accurately and artfully. Just as painting has its techniques, so poetry has its “blessèd structures, plot and rhyme” (Line 1). But unlike painting or photography, which captures human beings as “figures in [a] photograph” (Line 22), language breathes life into experience by its very essence. Simply by naming what is perceived, language gives life. Lowell concludes his poem by saying as much with language giving the gift of a “living name [emphasis added]” to what it touches (Line 23).
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By Robert Lowell
