 Bidart does not offer any explanation as to how the story of Lamkin and Lord Weary's castle relates to the content of Lowell's book.However, in a review of the book that appeared in "Poetry" magazine, the critic Austin Warren offered the explanation that the book's title implied that "disaster is befalling the house, and the household, of aristocratic (Calvinist, capitalist) New England, which has failed to pay its moral bills to the 'lower order,' its instruments.