The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket Analysis

Lowell gets wild with rhyme and meter in the poem, but have no fear. We'll break his methods down so you can master his madness in no time. We'll start with the big stuff. Lowell divides the poem i...

Sure, the poem is dedicated to Lowell's cousin who drowned at sea, but does that mean the poem is supposed to literally be from Lowell's perspective? Not necessarily—at the beginning of the poem,...

It might come as no surprise that, in a poem titled "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," most of the poem actually takes place—wait for it—in a Quaker graveyard in Nantucket. The sea-side locat...

Read the poem aloud: what do you hear?It's a noisy poem, that's for sure. The sounds spit and sputter and crash into each other, just like the sea. Lowell uses several effects to make the poem soun...

We spend much of the poem in an actual Quaker graveyard, in Nantucket, where the unmarked graves of sailors overlooks the water. It's the setting of the speaker's contemplation of these losses and...

Lowell can play with words, rhythms, and meter like nobody's business. These frequent and purposeful shifts in style add a particular music to his poems, and it's part of the reason he's considered...

While the images aren't too hard to discern, and the words are pretty easy to understand, there's are a good amount of allusion and metaphor going on here. Fortunately for us, Lowell returns...

"Lord Weary's Castle" won Lowell the Pulitzer prize in 1947. It sure looks like he was doing something right. (Source.) Unlike the speaker in the poem (who we see aboard a warship), Lowell refused...

Sorry to disappoint, but nothing risqué is happening here; our poor sailors are too busy battling the white whale and the wild sea to think about any funny-business (and the whale is pretty busy,...

Ahab: Captain of the ship, he died because of his pursuit of the white whale (15 and after)Pequod: The ship, too, perished in pursuit of the whale (31 and after)The "hurt beast" or "whited monster"...