Poem help: After the burial by James Russel lowe. Need to find how it mirrors his feelings using metaphor/ etc

Question

Also how does tone in the poem mirror his daughter's death:

Yes, faith is a goodly anchor;
When skies are sweet as a psalm,
At the bows it lolls so stalwart,
In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm.

And when over breakers to leeward
The tattered surges are hurled,
It may keep our head to the tempest,
With its grip on the base of the world.

But, after the shipwreck, tell me
What help in its iron thews,
Still true to the broken hawser,
Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?

In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,
When the helpless feet stretch out
And find in the deeps of darkness
No footing so solid as doubt,

Then better one spar of Memory
One broken plank of the Past,
That our human heart may cling to,
Though hopeless of shore at last!

To the spirit its splendid conjectures,
To the flesh its sweet despair,
Its tears o’er the thin-worn locket
With its anguish of deathless hair!

Immortal? I feel it and know it,
Who doubts it of such as she?
But that is the pang’s very secret, -
Immortal away from me.

There’s a narrow ridge in the graveyard
Would scarce stay a child in his race,
But to me and my thought it is wider
Than the star-sown vague of Space.

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
Your moral most drearily true;
But, since the earth clashed on her coffin,
I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;
‘Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.

It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,-
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock.

Communion in spirit! Forgive me,
But I, who am earthly and weak,
Would give all my incomes from dreamland
For a touch of her hand on my cheek.

That little shoe in the corner,
So worn and wrinkled and brown,
With its emptiness confutes you,
And argues your wisdom down.

Answer 1

Don't know if it helps but a quick search found this from the book "A Broken Heart Still Beats" by Anne McCracken & Mary Semel:

"Three of James Russell Lowell's children died in childhood. Lowell wrote this poem in 1850 after the death of his second child, Rose. He is responding to a friend who attempts to console him with talk of faith and immortality."

There's not much else out there on Google. You might try the Homework Help section here on Yahoo! Answers.

You might try looking at it a little closer too ... for example ... his use of the word "shipwreck" is a metaphor for what his daughter's death has done to life as he knows it. Good luck.