Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Lowell

Lowell’s line sounds like a theological reassurance, then quietly undermines its own confidence. “The Lord survives” implies endurance after catastrophe, as if God has been put through weather, history, or human cruelty and come out the other side. Survival is a human verb; attaching it to “the Lord” yokes divinity to damage, suggesting a modern faith that can’t pretend it floats above the wreckage.

Then comes the dazzling complication: “the rainbow of His will.” A rainbow is covenant imagery - Noah’s flood, mercy after judgment - but Lowell makes it less a gentle promise than a spectrum of force. “Will” is not love, not grace, not providence; it’s volition, power, the capacity to decide. The rainbow becomes an emblem of many-colored intention, a prismatic display that can seduce the eye while hinting at arbitrariness. It’s beautiful, but it’s also impersonal, even bureaucratic: God’s will as a mechanism with a sheen.

The subtext is Lowell’s signature tension between inherited belief and the 20th century’s evidence against easy consolation. Writing in the shadow of war, American power, and his own mental and spiritual turbulence, he often treats religious language as both a refuge and a pressure point. “Survives” can be read as indictment: if God survives His own will, what does that say about the cost of that will to everyone else? The line works because it compresses awe and suspicion into a single breath, turning a Sunday-school symbol into something harder, stranger, and psychologically true.