The Mills of The Kavanaughs - The Shorter Poems

The Shorter Poems

The other poems from the book, all significantly shorter than the title poem, include "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid," "Her Dead Brother," "Mother Marie Therese," "David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden," "The Fat Man in the Mirror" (which is based on a poem by the Austrian poet Franz Werfel), and "Thanksgiving's Over."

The last poem in the book, "Thanksgiving's Over," is similar to "The Mills of the Kavanaughs" in its basic premise. However, instead of a wife remembering her deceased husband, this time the roles are reversed and the widowed husband remembers his deceased wife (in this poem, the recollection occurs in a dream).

The poem "David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden" would later reappear in Lowell's book For the Union Dead in a revised form under the title "The Public Garden." During Lowell's 1963 public reading at the Guggenheim, he explained that many of his readers expressed confusion over the presence of the Biblical characters of David and Bathsheba being located in a modern park in Boston, and according to Lowell, the characters made the poem "impenetrable." So in order to make the poem more accessible, Lowell decided to completely remove David and Bathsheba from the revised, later version of the poem which was shorter and much more personal.