Liberal Arts Blog — Robert Lowell (1918–1977) — “For the Union Dead” — One Of The Most Anthologized Poems In English
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: Robert Lowell (1918–1977) — “For the Union Dead” — one of the most anthologized poems in English
This is a poem to read before and after you do a walking tour of downtown Boston — especially the Boston Common, the State House, and the Boston Public Garden. Especially. the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial — the bas-relief bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens across from the State House that is the “first civic monument to the heroism of African American soldiers” during the Civil War. The sculpture appeared on the cover of the first edition of Lowell’s poetry collection, “For the Union Dead” (1964).
The poem was partially inspired by a poem by Allen Tate (1899–1979), “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” (second link below). Lowell was a member of the Boston Brahmin family that included poets James and Amy Lowell. He dropped out of Harvard after two years and followed his mentor Allen Tate from Nashville to Kenyon College from which he graduated in 1940. He was a conscientious objector during World War Two and a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s.
He suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life and was frequently hospitalized at Mclean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. He had close relationships with poets Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in both 1947 and 1974.
Are you a fan? If so, what is your favorite of his poems? What is your favorite line of it?
Or for that matter, what is your favorite line of any poem that you have ever memorized that the rest might easily have missed — to our detriment.
Today, the text of “For the Union Dead” follows. Lowell tells the story of the underground parking lot under Boston Common when it was under construction. Have you ever parked there? I have — thousands of times. Next time will not be the same.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“THE OLD BOSTON AQUARIUM STANDS IN A SAHARA OF SNOW NOW”
1. “The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows all boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles driftingh from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.”
2. “My head draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the rish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steam shovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underground garage.”
3. “Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse. shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
“TWO MONTHS AFTER MARCHING THROUGH BOSTON, HALF THE REGIMENT WAS DEAD”
1. “Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat.”
2. “Its colonel is as lean as a compass needle. He has an angry wrenlike vitilance, a greyhound’s gentle tautness; he seems to wince for pleasure and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now.
He rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die — when he leads his black soldiers to death, he can not bend his back.”
“ON A THOUSAND SMALL TOWN NEW ENGLAND GREENS, THE OLD WHITE CHURCHES”
1. “On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion, frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year — wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns.”
2. “Shaw’s father wanted no monument except a ditch, where his son’t body was thrown and lost with his “niggers.” The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler safe, the “Rock of Ages” that survived the blast.”
3. “Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.”
COLONEL SHAW IS RIDING ON HIS BUBBLE, HE WAITS FOR THE BLESSED BREAK (below a 1915 advertisement for the Old South Boston Aquarium)
1. “Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessed break.”
2. “The Aquarium is gone.”
3. “Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish;”
NB: “a savage servility slides by on grease.”
FOOTNOTE — the last line of the poem evokes the iconic line of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” — “What rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
Apparently, the beast was in fact the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Convertible — nosing forward like a fish
For the Union Dead — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Union_Dead
Ode to the Confederate Dead — Wikipedia
The Most Anthologized Poems of the Last 25 Years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Boston_Aquarium
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
