Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,
They planted here the serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.
— Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell’s bitterly ironic “Children of Light” in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) is one of his most compressed and complex, highly allusive and little known poems. Many of the fifty books in my library on Lowell, including three I’ve written, do not even mention it and none provides a thorough analysis. The biblical title comes from Ephesians 5:8 and I Thessalonians 5:5 where the children of light are enlightened believers in Christ.
Lowell’s first line echoes John Milton’s vengeful and bloodthirsty sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (1655), which begins, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones,” and includes the line, “When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” Lowell, who also uses Milton’s stones/bones rhyme, equates the massacre of the dissident Protestants by the idolatrous Catholics in northern Italy with the massacre of Indians by Puritans in America. Both events took place in the seventeenth century. Milton believes the Protestants were the true children of light and the Catholics worshippers of pagan idols. Lowell condemns his Puritan ancestors, the self-proclaimed children of light, who justified their savage genocide with hypocritical religious beliefs. Lowell, a Catholic convert, attacks the Protestants; Milton, a Protestant, attacks the Catholics. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who decorated his fence posts with the skulls of Africans his men had killed, the Indian killers “fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones.”
Lowell’s “unhouseled,” a crucial theological word, comes from the Ghost’s speech to Hamlet (1.5.77) and means “without the sacrament of communion.” Lowell uses it to describe the Puritans, some of whom left from the (hellish) Netherlands and were influenced by the strict Calvinists of Geneva. These religiose fanatics are damned by the evil “Serpent’s seed,” the descendants of Adam and Eve exiled from Eden. The Puritans are also cursed by the blood of Cain — forced to wander landless after he killed his brother Abel — and doomed to kill the Indians to take over their land.
The light imagery of the title is reflected in the seeds of light and the searchlights that probe and shock the fragile “glass houses” built on the rock that once supported the church but are now destined to destruction. (Punning on Peter’s name Christ declared, “upon this rock I will build my church.”) The third light, instead of preserving the “seeds” that must be placed in the ground to grow wheat and make bread, flares into flame and burns the “unburied grain.” The “unhouseled” Puritans, wandering like Cain, lack the consolation of a sacred burial. The weak light of the guttering candles and the empty altar suggest the extinction of the Puritans’ cruel religion.