Home After Three Months Away

The author of “Home After Three Months Away” is the prolific New England poet Robert Lowell. Published in 1959 in his award-winning book Life Studies, the poem represents his intimate approach to poetry. Born into a prestigious family, Lowell led a tempestuous life marked by mental health conditions and rocky marriages. He used his personal experiences in his poetry and helped create a poetry genre known as Confessional poetry. The speaker in “Home After Three Months Away” is Lowell and his poetic persona, as the title refers to Lowell coming home from a psychiatric hospital. As with much of Lowell’s Confessional poetry, “Home After Three Months Away” uses intimate details of the poet’s life as a part of craft. He uses imagery, allusion, and symbolism as well to convey his internal state and to communicate the harrowing experiences with mania and bipolar disorder. “Home After Three Months Away” is one of many well-known poems in Life Studies. The others include “Waking in the Blue” and the regularly anthologized “Skunk Hour.” Like “Home After Three Months Away,” these poems are confessional in tone and provide an acute depiction of Lowell’s disquieting mental health.

Poet Biography

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV—Robert Lowell—was born on March 1, 1917. The Lowell biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, says the poet belonged to one of the “first families of Boston” (Robert Lowell in Love. University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, p. 5). The family tree included Civil War commanders, a president of Harvard, and a millionaire mountain climber. His illustrious background brought him a slew of privileges and opportunities. Lowell attended the prestigious prep school St. Mark’s (also founded by a member of the Lowell Family tree), and he studied with writers like Ford Maddox Ford and Allen Tate at Harvard University and Kenyon College.

Tate wrote the introduction to his first book, Land of Unlikeness (1944). Two years later, Lowell published Lord Weary’s Castle, which won the Pulitzer Prize and helped push Lowell into the public spotlight. From 1947-1948, Lowell was the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress—a prestigious government position now known as the US Poet Laureate. In 1959, Lowell published Life Studies, which won the National Book Award and brought the Confessional genre of poetry into the spotlight. In a 2009 lecture for the Poetry Foundation, the famous critic Helen Vendler said Life Studies would “change the course of American Verse.” Aside from personal poetry, Lowell published translations and verses about historical figures. He taught, too, and his students included famous Confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich.

Lowell married three times. His first wife was the fiction writer Jean Stafford. Then, Lowell married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. His third wife was Caroline Blackwood, heir to the Guinness brewery fortune. With Hardwick, Lowell had a daughter, Harriet. Blackwood and Lowell had a son, Sheridan. Lowell had bipolar disorder, and affairs and abuse defined all three of his marriages. Lowell wrote openly about his fraught personal life. In The Dolphin (1973), Lowell turned parts of Hardwick’s private letters into verse, a choice that created scandal in the literary world. Many criticized Lowell’s appropriation of Hardwick’s words, including Rich and Lowell’s close friend, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Yet The Dolphin netted Lowell his second Pulitzer Prize. By the end of his life, Lowell couldn’t decide whether to stay with Blackwood or return to Hardwick. In 1977, Lowell was in a New York City taxi on his way to visit Hardwick when he had a heart attack and died.

Poem Text

Lowell, Robert. “Home After Three Months Away.” 1959. Poets.org.

Summary

The poem starts with a departure, as the “baby’s nurse” is “[g]one now” (Line 1). The nurse doesn’t come across as amicable. The speaker—Lowell or, better put, Lowell’s poetic persona—calls the nurse “a lioness” (Line 2). Her aggressive and dominating personality made “the Mother cry” (Line 3). The mom is Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell’s second wife. The speaker tells how the nurse tied “gobbets of porkrind” (Line 5) on their “eight foot magnolia tree” (Line 7), which fed the English sparrows and helped them survive “a Boston winter” (Line 9).

Lowell has been gone for three months. Someone asks, “Is Richard now himself again?” (Line 11). Lowell doesn’t answer the question; instead, he focuses on his daughter, Harriet. She’s in the bathtub, and their “noses rub” (Line 14). Lowell says he’s now 41 and refers to his time at the psychiatric hospital—13 weeks—as “child’s play” (Line 19). Lowell’s daughter then “dabs her cheeks” (Line 20). The gesture prompts Lowell to shave. Yet Lowell can’t shave since his daughter puts his “shaving brush / and washcloth in the flush” (Lines 24-25), which suggests they’re floating around in the toilet. Still covered in shaving cream, Lowell compares himself to “a polar bear” (Line 27).

Still recovering from his last mental health experience, Lowell isn’t up to much. However, a choreman or all-purpose worker tends to the Lowells’ garden. One year ago, the garden soil sprouted “pedigreed” (Line 33) flowers. Due to the “late spring snow” (Line 36), the fancy flowers are now indistinguishable from weeds. The withered flowers connect to Lowell’s condition—“frizzled, stale and small” (Line 40).