The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is an influential poem by Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

. It was first published in 1946 in his collection Lord Weary's Castle

Lord Weary's Castle

Lord Weary's Castle, Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publisher after he saw the manuscript for Lord Weary's Castle and...

.

The poem is mostly written in a combination of pentameter and trimeter and divided into seven sections. It is dedicated to Lowell's cousin, "Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea." According to the Notes in Lowell's Collected Poems, "The body of Warren Winslow . . .was never recovered after his Navy destroyer, Turner, sank from an accidental explosion in New York harbor during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

."

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.'

It also makes the first reference to Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

's Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...

, specifically to the fictional character Captain Ahab

Captain Ahab

Captain Ahab may refer to:* Ahab , the captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick* Captain Ahab , a Los Angeles based pop/electronic band...

.

• The second introduces the Quaker graveyard and Lowell's cousin.
• 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...') and references the Pequod
  Pequod
  Pequod may refer to:*Pequot, tribe of Native Americans*Pequod , a fictional whaleship that appears in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick...
  
  , which was Captain Ahab's ship.
• 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 (separately-titled 'Our Lady of Walsingham
  Our Lady of Walsingham
  Our Lady of Walsingham is a title used for Mary, the mother of Jesus. The title derives from the belief that Mary appeared in a vision to Richeldis de Faverches, a devout Saxon noblewoman, in 1061 in the village of Walsingham in Norfolk, England...
  
  ') 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.