For the Union Dead
‘Relinquunt
Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.’
(Robert
Lowell 1917 - 1977)
The old South
Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of
snow now. Its broken windows are
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
drifting from the
noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws
back. I often sigh still
for the dark
downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and
reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against
the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the
Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur
steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up
tons of mush and grass
to gouge their
underworld garage.
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;
at the dedication,
William James
could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument
sticks like a fishbone
In the city’s
throat.
Its Colonel as
lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry
wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s
gentle tautness;
he seems to wince
at 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 cannot bend his
back.
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-wasted, they
doze over muskets
and muse through
their sideburns …
Shaw’s father
wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s
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. 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.
The Aquarium is
gone, Everywhere,
giant finned cars
nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on
grease.
The thing I’ve enjoyed in my affair
with Lowell’s, For the Union Dead is
the paths of study it has led me down.
And I don’t think you can really approach this poem without doing a lot
of study. I’ve found it beneficial to
read about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment; Colonel Robert Gould
Shaw and his father; the battle of Fort Wagner; abolitionists; Gauden; William
James and his dedication speech; Brahmin families and Boston society; what is a
Mosler safe; civil rights movement in the 1960’s …… But I’m still left with what is the true
message in the poem. It probably is as some
analyses suggest, a swipe at Boston city politics at the time; a lament for the
erosion of puritan values; a family history at odds with a changing world. It does have a feeling of Mans’ spiritual progression which the
poet perhaps believes is in a downward spiral.
I can’t leave it, and I go back to Robert Lowell himself. He was for a time a Catholic convert –
referred to by professor, Allen Tate as a ‘Catholic poet’ in his introduction
to Lowell’s book, Land of Unlikeness
(Wikipedia, Robert Lowell). So that gets
me thinking there are a couple of lines in this poem that make me think this is
Lowell’s comment on the evolution of mankind.
I believe the third stanza line, I
often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and
reptile, is not nostalgia for a childhood memory, but is a reference to
man’s primeval memory of having evolved from a fish/reptile form (kingdom of God). I often
sigh still – but man cannot remain, cannot go back, he must go on to fulfil
purpose. Then there is the line in
stanza 10, “… man’s lovely, peculiar
power to choose life and die – “.
God has given man free will (power
to choose life), the thing that separates man from animals (fish, reptiles). Man has the power to choose ‘life’ (spiritual
life, eternal life as God offers). But
in his freedom to choose, man continually makes choices that lead to death (of
mankind). Lowell’s ancestor (Colonel
Shaw) tried to uphold noble choice but in vain, for man’s prejudice and
inhumanity still goes on. Man chooses
materialism and belief in technology and science (and dies).
Great poem, and I’m once more amazed at
the connection between Navy and Poetry – Robert Lowell’s father was a Commander
in the US Navy (Robert Traill Spencer Lowell III). His mum seems to have come from good stock
too.
My link for this post is a poem I wrote
a couple of years ago when I’m looking at all the turmoil and trouble in the world
and I’m a lot like Robert Lowell, wondering where the hell are we headed!
2012. The
world is evolving, ever turning and evolving.
Mankind is evolving, ever learning and evolving. And it hasn’t come far, and it’s got a long,
long way to go.
I Don’t Understand
I see television news,
I see children, young children
on the streets in Syria
with hatred on their faces
clapping fervently for the downfall
of the country’s political ruling party.
I see African families, a man and a woman
fleeing the latest genocide famine,
escaping down some dirt track
they’ve reportedly been on
for the past two years,
but in which time
they’ve kept on copulating
giving birth to two little lives
now starving and disease driven in their
arms.
I see men, fit men
on a normal work day
apparently not having to hold down jobs,
keep on top of a mortgage, nor
bring in food, pay bills, petrol, child-care
gathered in a town square,
all armed with modern automatic weapons
wasting bullets fired straight up to the sky.
