Much of Lowell's early poetry contains meaty themes and sonorous voicing. A seven-part lament in iambic pentameter, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" (1946) was dedicated to his cousin, lost at sea during World War II and commemorated as the drowned figure dredged up from the Atlantic in stave I. The poet launches forth in grand style with compound words — for example, whaleroad, dead-lights, heel-headed, and dreadnaughts — and frequent allusions to the Old Testament and to Captain Ahab, drowned skipper of the Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. As though the universe demands payment for an untimely drowning, the winds beat on stones and gulls grasp the sea by the throat. The address grows more impassioned in stave III, which depicts the "whited monster," Moby Dick, as Jehovah, who, in Genesis 3:14, identified himself to Moses, "I am that I am." The cry of god-fearing Quaker sailors concludes with their assurance that God shelters the faithful.
Bound with erratic rhymes (roll/Hole, into the fat/Jehoshaphat) and slant rhymes (world/sword), stave III builds on the image of piety with a cry from Psalm 130, reiterated in the Latin mass, "Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord." At a high emotional point on the edge of apocalypse, the poet demands atonement with "Who will dance / The mast-lashed master of Leviathans / Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?" In grim alliterated pictures of the whale's destruction, the poet questions how the destroyer of the great beast will hide his sin, which risks a God-hurled punishment. A complex image of "Jonas Messias," a composite of Jonah and Christ, requires an act of martyrdom as dire as steel gashing flesh, an allusion to Christ, whose side a Roman soldier pierced at the end of the crucifixion.
