"Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls"
About this Quote
Lowell gives hate a body, and it is not human. "Ravening vulture beaks" strips the emotion of any romantic grandeur and recasts it as scavenging hunger: hate doesn’t create so much as it feeds on what’s already dead, already ruined, already made available. The phrasing is surgical. Not a single vulture, but beaks - plural, dismembered, relentless, coming in pieces. Hate is a swarm of appetites, not a coherent ideology. It descends.
The "place of skulls" does double duty. It’s biblical (Golgotha, the execution hill), and it’s archeological: a site where violence has settled into residue. Lowell’s point isn’t only that hate kills; it’s that hate arrives when the killing is effectively done, to pick the bones and make a spectacle of the aftermath. That’s the subtextual insult: hatred is less a force of conviction than an opportunistic parasitism.
As a poet writing in the early 20th century, Lowell is steeped in imagist precision and a modern awareness of mass death; the image anticipates a century defined by mechanized slaughter and the politics that follow it. She also nails a psychological truth: hate often feels righteous to the hater, but from the outside it reads as carrion behavior - noisy, repetitive, and ultimately dependent on devastation it didn’t have the courage to face while it was alive.
The "place of skulls" does double duty. It’s biblical (Golgotha, the execution hill), and it’s archeological: a site where violence has settled into residue. Lowell’s point isn’t only that hate kills; it’s that hate arrives when the killing is effectively done, to pick the bones and make a spectacle of the aftermath. That’s the subtextual insult: hatred is less a force of conviction than an opportunistic parasitism.
As a poet writing in the early 20th century, Lowell is steeped in imagist precision and a modern awareness of mass death; the image anticipates a century defined by mechanized slaughter and the politics that follow it. She also nails a psychological truth: hate often feels righteous to the hater, but from the outside it reads as carrion behavior - noisy, repetitive, and ultimately dependent on devastation it didn’t have the courage to face while it was alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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