The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

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The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is an influential poem by Robert Lowell. It was first published in 1946 in his collection Lord Weary's Castle.

The poem is dedicated to his cousin 'Warren Winslow, dead at sea' and is in seven sections, with the sixth being separately titled Our Lady of Walsingham.

Sections:-

The first describes the discovery by a fleet of warships, of a sailor's corpse at sea ('the drowned sailor clutched the drag net') and its reburial with military honours

'The guns of the steeled fleet

Recoil and then repeat

The hoarse salute.'

The second introduces the Quaker graveyard and 'Ahab's whaleboats in the East' (cf Moby Dick)

The third muses on the death of his cousin and on the dying thoughts and beliefs of the Quaker sailors buried there.

The fourth continues the meditation on the sailors' bones and whale bones gathered there ('This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale...'

The fifth considers the violent death of the whale at the hands of the hunter ('And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,'

The sixth (Our Lady of Walsingham') is mainly a meditation of the saint's shrine in Norfolk, with a passing reference to the main subject

'Sailor, you were glad

And whistled Sion by that stream.'

and concludes

'She knows what God knows,

Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem

Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham. '

Finally in the seventh section the poet returns to his main subject and to the origin, and meaning, of life itself...

'You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime

And breathed into his face the breath of life,

And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.'

The final, oft-quoted, line appears to be open to a variety of interpretations.