Robert Lowell

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations (For Elizabeth Bishop) Dedication Lowell’s poem is modeled on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo,” which Bishop had dedicated to Lowell. Nautilus Island’s Nautilus Island’s Lowell once remarked, “The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town.” hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage she’s in her dotage Echoes “the world is in its dotage”, from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield(1766). . Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill— we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill A red fox stain covers Blue Hill Lowell wrote, “The red fox stain was merely meant to describe the rusty reddish color of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain near where we were living.” . And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry. One dark night One dark night Echoes The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic (1542-1591). In his talk “On ‘Skunk Hour,’” Lowell stated, "I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross's poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existential night.” , my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull hill’s skull "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus" (Luke: 23:33, NRSV). Both "Golgotha,” in Hebrew, and "Calvary," from Latin ("Calvaria") mean "skull". ; I watched for love-cars I watched for love-cars "watching the lovers was not mine, but from an anecdote about Walt Whitman in his old age" The notes in Robert Lowell: Selected Poems(2006) explains the anecdote: "In the early 1970s, Elizabeth Bishop told Frank Bidart that the source of the anecdote was Logan Pearsall Smith's Unforgotten Years(1939): Almost every afternoon my father would take Walt Whitman driving in the Park; it was an unfailing interest to them to drive as close as they could behind buggies in which pairs of lovers were seated, and observe the degree of slope towards each other, or "buggy-angle," as they called it, of these couples; and if ever they saw this angle of approximation narrowed to an embrace, my father and Walt Whitman, who had ever honored that joy-giving power of nature symbolized under the name of Venus, would return home with happy hearts. (p. 99) . Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves shelves Slopes down on the town. . . . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . .” “Love, O careless Love. . . . “A popular blues song of the time written by W.C. Handy and performed by Bessie Smith (1925), in which the narrator threatens to kill his or her wayward lover. The song was performed with slight variations of lyrics by many musicians before Lowell wrote this poem in 1959, including Fats Domino (1956). I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell I myself am hell An echo of Satan speaking in John Milton's Paradise Lost: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Book 4, line 75) ; nobody’s here— only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spar Nautical term for a mast spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column column Figuratively, a military formation of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

[ February 1954 ] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks.... When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother traveled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... While the passengers were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only “unhistoric” soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo, slats of dust distracted by a downdraw; I woke and knew I held a cigarette; I looked, there was none, could have been none; I slept off years before I woke again, palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw I was holding two lighted cigarettes. . . . They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death. Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble, his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten.“What kept you so long, racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition? You didn’t write, you re wrote.... But tell me, Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?”

[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket— The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came, Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name Is blocked in yellow chalk. Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its hell-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute. II Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers, As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones, Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East. III All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god, Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain, Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod Guns, cradled on the tide, Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock Our warships in the hand Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost In the mad scramble of their lives. They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry: “If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side, When the Atlantic rose against us, why, Then it had swallowed us up quick.” IV This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell: This is the end of them, three-quarters fools, Snatching at straws to sail Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale, Spouting out blood and water as it rolls, Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals: Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail For water, for the deep where the high tide Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs. Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out, Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs, The beach increasing, its enormous snout Sucking the ocean’s side. This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water. Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? V When the whale’s viscera go and the roll Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags, Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather, Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers Where the morning stars sing out together And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side. VI OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM There once the penitents took off their shoes And then walked barefoot the remaining mile; And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file Slowly along the munching English lane, Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose Track of your dragging pain. The stream flows down under the druid tree, Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad And whistled Sion by that stream. But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness At all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids. As before, This face, for centuries a memory, Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows, Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham. VII The empty winds are creaking and the oak Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph, The boughs are trembling and a gaff Bobs on the untimely stroke Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well; Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish: Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers, Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil 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.

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house I “I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!” That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. ... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound.... Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather’s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. One afternoon in 1922, I sat on the stone porch, looking through screens as black-grained as drifting coal. Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather’s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; stogie-brown beams; fools’-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, its legs, shellacked saplings. A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn fished with a broom straw in a basin hollowed out of a millstone. Like my Grandfather, the d é cor was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather’s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime. II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn display windows of Rogers Peet’s boys’ store below the State House in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin’s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for “Auction,” and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer— its naked Greek statues draped with purple like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear. IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... A fluff of the west wind puffing my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds:Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,” where my Uncle’s duck blind floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded. Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. As if posed for “the engagement photograph,” he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga was accepting the arm of her “protector,” the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, and coils of hair like rooster tails. The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts being bushwhacked on the veldt— They were almost life-size.... My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. “You are behaving like children,” said my Grandfather, when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters, and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ... I cowered in terror. I wasn’t a child at all— unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero.... Near me was the white measuring-door my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights. In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet. While I sat on the tiles, and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse, Uncle Devereux stood behind me. He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle. He was animated, hierarchical, like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.... My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile.... Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.

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 tranquillized 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 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....

The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the sore spots of the earth. On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave. Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair, raccoons clean their meat in the creek. On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation— prongs and spearheads of some equatorial backland that will inherit the globe. The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes, and die dishevelled and soft. We cannot name their names, or number their dates— circle on circle, like rings on a tree— but we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid. It seems the least little shove would land us there, that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year— wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

An old man in Concord forgets to go to morning service. He falls asleep, while reading Vergil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince. The sun is blue and scarlet on my page, And yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, rage The yellowhammers mating. Yellow fire Blankets the captives dancing on their pyre, And the scorched lictor screams and drops his rod. Trojans are singing to their drunken God, Ares. Their helmets catch on fire. Their files Clank by the body of my comrade—miles Of filings! Now the scythe-wheeled chariot rolls Before their lances long as vaulting poles, And I stand up and heil the thousand men, Who carry Pallas to the bird-priest. Then The bird-priest groans, and as his birds foretold, I greet the body, lip to lip. I hold The sword that Dido used. It tries to speak, A bird with Dido’s sworded breast. Its beak Clangs and ejaculates the Punic word I hear the bird-priest chirping like a bird. I groan a little. “Who am I, and why?” It asks, a boy’s face, though its arrow-eye Is working from its socket. “Brother, try, O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.” His harlots hang his bed With feathers of his long-tailed birds. His head Is yawning like a person. The plumes blow; The beard and eyebrows ruffle. Face of snow, You are the flower that country girls have caught, A wild bee-pillaged honey-suckle brought To the returning bridegroom—the design Has not yet left it, and the petals shine; The earth, its mother, has, at last, no help: It is itself. The broken-winded yelp Of my Phoenician hounds, that fills the brush With snapping twigs and flying, cannot flush The ghost of Pallas. But I take his pall, Stiff with its gold and purple, and recall How Dido hugged it to her, while she toiled, Laughing—her golden threads, a serpent coiled In cypress. Now I lay it like a sheet; It clinks and settles down upon his feet, The careless yellow hair that seemed to burn Beforehand. Left foot, right foot—as they turn, More pyres are rising: armored horses, bronze, And gagged Italians, who must file by ones Across the bitter river, when my thumb Tightens into their wind-pipes. The beaks drum; Their headman’s cow-horned death’s-head bites its tongue, And stiffens, as it eyes the hero slung Inside his feathered hammock on the crossed Staves of the eagles that we winged. Our cost Is nothing to the lovers, whoring Mars And Venus, father’s lover. Now his car’s Plumage is ready, and my marshals fetch His squire, Acoctes, white with age, to hitch Aethon, the hero’s charger, and its ears Prick, and it steps and steps, and stately tears Lather its teeth; and then the harlots bring The hero’s charms and baton—but the King, Vain-glorious Turnus, carried off the rest. “I was myself, but Ares thought it best The way it happened.” At the end of time, He sets his spear, as my descendants climb The knees of Father Time, his beard of scalps, His scythe, the arc of steel that crowns the Alps. The elephants of Carthage hold those snows, Turms of Numidian horse unsling their bows, The flaming turkey-feathered arrows swarm Beyond the Alps. “Pallas,” I raise my arm And shout, “Brother, eternal health. Farewell Forever.” Church is over, and its bell Frightens the yellowhammers, as I wake And watch the whitecaps wrinkle up the lake. Mother’s great-aunt, who died when I was eight, Stands by our parlor sabre. “Boy, it’s late. Vergil must keep the Sabbath.” Eighty years! It all comes back. My Uncle Charles appears. Blue-capped and bird-like. Phillips Brooks and Grant Are frowning at his coffin, and my aunt, Hearing his colored volunteers parade Through Concord, laughs, and tells her English maid To clip his yellow nostril hairs, and fold His colors on him. . . . It is I. I hold His sword to keep from falling, for the dust On the stuffed birds is breathless, for the bust Of young Augustus weighs on Vergil’s shelf: It scowls into my glasses at itself.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.