For the Union Dead
For the Union Dead
Original Text
Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007: 178.
1The old South Boston Aquarium stands
2in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
3The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
4The airy tanks are dry.
5Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
6my hand tingled
7to burst the bubbles
8drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
9My hand draws back. I often sigh still
10for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
11of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
12I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
13fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
14yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
15as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
16to gouge their underworld garage.
17Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
18sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
19A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
20braces the tingling Statehouse,
21shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
22and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
23on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
24propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
25Two months after marching through Boston,
26half the regiment was dead;
27at the dedication,
28William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
29Their monument sticks like a fishbone
30in the city's throat.
31Its Colonel is as lean
32as a compass-needle.
33He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
34a greyhound's gentle tautness;
35he seems to wince at pleasure,
36and suffocate for privacy.
37He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
38peculiar power to choose life and die--
39when he leads his black soldiers to death,
40he cannot bend his back.
41On a thousand small town New England greens,
42the old white churches hold their air
43of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
44quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
45The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
46grow slimmer and younger each year--
47wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
48and muse through their sideburns . . .
49Shaw's father wanted no monument
50except the ditch,
51where his son's body was thrown
52and lost with his "niggers."
53The ditch is nearer.
54There are no statues for the last war here;
55on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
56shows Hiroshima boiling
57over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
58that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
59When I crouch to my television set,
60the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
61Colonel Shaw
62is riding on his bubble,
63he waits
64for the blessèd break.
65The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
66giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
67a savage servility
68slides by on grease.
Publication Start Year
1964
Publication Notes
For the Union Dead
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire, assisted by Ana Berdinskikh
RPO Edition
2009
Rhyme
Form