For The Union Dead Poem by Robert Lowell

For The Union Dead

Rating: 3.6

<i>Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.</i>

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 sign 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 of 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 is 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 statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, 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 statutes 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.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Frank Papaycik 21 July 2010

GLORY Perhaps Keats Ozymandius one or the other was right The Instant The Memory are The Fleet The Monument remains for ever withstanding The Vagaries of The Moment

4 13 Reply
Thabani Khumalo 16 June 2015

I have a vision to write like this, only if god would bless me enough to.lm

1 4 Reply
John Looker 17 May 2020

Such a pity there are typographical mistakes in the printing above. It should read: 'My hand draws back. I often sigh now...' 'The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier...' '... and younger each year— ' 'There are no statues for the last war here' 'showed Hiroshima boiling' Is there any possibility of correcting the text please?

0 0 Reply
Michael Walker 25 July 2019

A superb, evocative poem of the Civill War from the perspective of the North. 'Colonel Shaw and his bell- cheeked Negro infantry'. How memorable are, 'The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier'. A great poet.

0 0 Reply
Paresh Chakra 01 December 2018

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. This line is very nice

0 0 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 10 December 2015

my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. the speaker is still remembering the excitement of being at the aquarium. He was so captivated that he wanted to reach in a pop the bubbles coming from the mouths of the fish

11 0 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 10 December 2015

' Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam ' They gave up all to serve the republic. the Latin phrase is engraved in the actual Civil War memorial

11 0 Reply
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Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

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