For the Union Dead
Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
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 steam shovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking lots luxuriate like civic
sand piles 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.
The 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. 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-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 statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
showed 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.
By Robert Lowell
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 steam shovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking lots luxuriate like civic
sand piles 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.
The 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. 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-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 statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
showed 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.
By Robert Lowell
It is imperative for a conscientious reader to understand the author, the circumstance, and the theme of a work to appreciate its meaning? "For the Union Dead" proves this point and makes an excellent study for a young reader who seeks the truth. Now that you have read the poem once, try it a couple of more times after reading the critique below.
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw
Robert Gould Shaw was the son of a prominent Boston abolitionist family. In the face of widespread skepticism about the ability of blacks to fight, the staunchly abolitionist governor of Massachusetts, James A. Andrew, sought out white officers from prominent families with antislavery convictions to lead black regiments.
In response, Robert Shaw went about the organization of his command, recruiting free blacks from all over New England and some from beyond. By the time Andrew tapped him to lead the 54th, he had risen to the rank of colonel at the age of 25. Colonel Shaw commanded the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first regiment of black troops organized in a Northern state. All the previous 11 "colored" regiments had been raised principally from freed slaves in occupied areas. The 54th reportedly included Frederick Douglass’ two sons and the grandson of abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
The regiment was mustered into service on May 13, 1863, with Shaw as its colonel, and was sent to the South Carolina coast to take part in the operations against the cradle of secession, Charleston.
Shaw was a demanding leader whose soldiers came to respect and even admire their Boston Brahmin commander. Among other things, Shaw protested the injustice of paying his men less than white infantrymen; for 18 months they refused to accept anything less than full compensation before receiving full back pay.
Despite the regiment's valor, the attack was repulsed with the 54th suffering 272 casualties (45% of its total strength). Colonel Shaw, age 26, was killed in this Second Battle of Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina on July 18, 1863. He, like many others, had sacrificed himself for the unity of the nation. The other Federal units in the attack suffered heavy losses as well. Union casualties for the day numbered more than 1,500.
Angered by the use of black soldiers, the Confederates stripped Shaw's body and buried it with his men in a mass grave believing that it would humiliate his memory. Confederate General Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of the other Union officers who had died, but left Shaw's where it was. Hagood informed a captured Union surgeon that "had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the niggers that fell with him."
According to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Confederate officer who, when questioned about the location of Shaw's grave, replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." The phrase evidently became something of a Union rallying cry.
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw
Robert Gould Shaw was the son of a prominent Boston abolitionist family. In the face of widespread skepticism about the ability of blacks to fight, the staunchly abolitionist governor of Massachusetts, James A. Andrew, sought out white officers from prominent families with antislavery convictions to lead black regiments.
In response, Robert Shaw went about the organization of his command, recruiting free blacks from all over New England and some from beyond. By the time Andrew tapped him to lead the 54th, he had risen to the rank of colonel at the age of 25. Colonel Shaw commanded the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first regiment of black troops organized in a Northern state. All the previous 11 "colored" regiments had been raised principally from freed slaves in occupied areas. The 54th reportedly included Frederick Douglass’ two sons and the grandson of abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
The regiment was mustered into service on May 13, 1863, with Shaw as its colonel, and was sent to the South Carolina coast to take part in the operations against the cradle of secession, Charleston.
Shaw was a demanding leader whose soldiers came to respect and even admire their Boston Brahmin commander. Among other things, Shaw protested the injustice of paying his men less than white infantrymen; for 18 months they refused to accept anything less than full compensation before receiving full back pay.
Despite the regiment's valor, the attack was repulsed with the 54th suffering 272 casualties (45% of its total strength). Colonel Shaw, age 26, was killed in this Second Battle of Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina on July 18, 1863. He, like many others, had sacrificed himself for the unity of the nation. The other Federal units in the attack suffered heavy losses as well. Union casualties for the day numbered more than 1,500.
Angered by the use of black soldiers, the Confederates stripped Shaw's body and buried it with his men in a mass grave believing that it would humiliate his memory. Confederate General Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of the other Union officers who had died, but left Shaw's where it was. Hagood informed a captured Union surgeon that "had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the niggers that fell with him."
(Lorien Foote. Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw
and Nineteenth-century Reform. 2003)
According to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Confederate officer who, when questioned about the location of Shaw's grave, replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." The phrase evidently became something of a Union rallying cry.
The letter informing Shaw’s family of his death noted that “the black
soldiers marched side by side with their white comrades in arms to the
assault,” and then inserted, in parentheses, the words which give this
show its title: “Tell it with pride to the world.”
Shaw's father, Frank, who had the right as an officer to have the colonel's body brought home for burial, recognized the appropriateness of this end in the light of his son's principles, and the implicit racism of those Northerners who saw in the act only an outrage. He wanted no other monument for his son but "the ditch."
Shaw's father, Frank, who had the right as an officer to have the colonel's body brought home for burial, recognized the appropriateness of this end in the light of his son's principles, and the implicit racism of those Northerners who saw in the act only an outrage. He wanted no other monument for his son but "the ditch."
In a letter to the regimental surgeon, Lincoln Stone, Frank Shaw wrote:
"Since learning of the place of our dear son's burial, we would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by
his brave and devoted soldiers if we could. We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies,
among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company. My only
desire in this respect now is that I may someday be able to erect a monument
over him and them.—What a body guard he has."
Thus, Shaw symbolized Union idealism at the time of his death. Poet Robert Lowell had a family connection to the colonel. Shaw's sister, Josephine, had married one of Lowell's ancestors, Charles Russell Lowell (who, like Robert Gould Shaw, was also killed in the Civil War).
The poem is thus, though undeclared as so, a family poem. And, in some ways, "For the Union Dead" is a deliberate reply to Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," which revolves around the same two figures, the poet-outsider and the dead hero.
"For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell honors not only the person of Robert Gould Shaw, but also the stern and beautiful memorial bronze bas-relief by Augustus Saint Gaudens which stands opposite the Boston State House. The bas-relief represents Colonel Shaw, an American military officer in the Union Army, on horseback among the men of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.
Shaw’s mother and father did not have a patronizing view of the relationship between their son and his men and indeed shared a sentiment of African American empowerment that was embodied in a line from Lord Byron that abolitionists often quoted—“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” Thus, Shaw's parents objected to the original design for the memorial because it showed their son on horseback, elevated above the figures of the enlisted men around him on foot.
Nevertheless, a public commission funded Saint-Gauden’s bas-relief, which portrayed this design, and it was dedicated as a memorial to Shaw in 1897. On that occasion the featured speakers were William James, American philosopher, and famed educator, author and orator Booker T. Washington for whom the Monument stood for "effort, not complete victor."
(Lorien Foote. Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw
and Nineteenth-century Reform. 2003)
Thus, Shaw symbolized Union idealism at the time of his death. Poet Robert Lowell had a family connection to the colonel. Shaw's sister, Josephine, had married one of Lowell's ancestors, Charles Russell Lowell (who, like Robert Gould Shaw, was also killed in the Civil War).
The poem is thus, though undeclared as so, a family poem. And, in some ways, "For the Union Dead" is a deliberate reply to Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," which revolves around the same two figures, the poet-outsider and the dead hero.
"For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell honors not only the person of Robert Gould Shaw, but also the stern and beautiful memorial bronze bas-relief by Augustus Saint Gaudens which stands opposite the Boston State House. The bas-relief represents Colonel Shaw, an American military officer in the Union Army, on horseback among the men of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.
Shaw’s mother and father did not have a patronizing view of the relationship between their son and his men and indeed shared a sentiment of African American empowerment that was embodied in a line from Lord Byron that abolitionists often quoted—“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” Thus, Shaw's parents objected to the original design for the memorial because it showed their son on horseback, elevated above the figures of the enlisted men around him on foot.
Nevertheless, a public commission funded Saint-Gauden’s bas-relief, which portrayed this design, and it was dedicated as a memorial to Shaw in 1897. On that occasion the featured speakers were William James, American philosopher, and famed educator, author and orator Booker T. Washington for whom the Monument stood for "effort, not complete victor."
William James himself was prevented by poor eyesight from fighting in the Civil War. It may be relevant here that William James's one brother, Garth Wilkinson James, was Colonel Shaw's adjutant, and suffered a wound that left him a semi-invalid for life, in the battle in which Shaw was killed. In spite of his invalidism, the younger Garth James went South during Reconstruction and attempted to run a communal, integrated plantation.
Public reassessment eventually refocused on the memorial of the 54th Massachusetts as a whole, rather than on Shaw in particular. In 1982, the names of the African-American soldiers who died were added to the reverse side of the memorial.
Lowell delivered this occasional poem, "For the Union Dead," at the Boston Arts Festival in June, 1960. In the poem, Lowell paints a picture of a long-time Boston resident reflecting on the memorial of Colonel Shaw and the 54th infantry, as well as musing on the development and unfavorable current state of South Boston.
It would be wise to remember American history and civil rights struggles of the time: beginning in February, 1960, just as Lowell was working in earnest on "For the Union Dead," four freshmen from a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, began their sit-in at the local Woolworth's lunch counter, garnering wide media attention and sparking not only public debate over segregation but also similar demonstrations. And, of course, this was just one example of the long fight for freedom.
Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977)
In
1917, Robert Lowell was born into one of Boston's oldest and most
prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before
transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for
which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were
influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and
explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy. - See more at:
http://voiceseducation.org/content/robert-lowell-union-dead#sthash.OcIQAgLK.dpuf
Robert Trail Spence Lowell IV was born on March 1, 1917, into two
distinguished families. In addition to poets such as James Russell
Lowell and Amy Lowell, the Lowell family boasted school-masters,
presidents of colleges and universities (including Harvard), and
successful businessmen. The Lowell family earned enough prestige to inspire a famous quip, “The Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.”
On his mother’s side, the Winslow family directly descended from ancestors who came to America on the Mayflower and who participated prominently in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Two were elected governor of Plymouth Plantation; another, whose legacy Lowell discusses in a poem, earned a less savory reputation as an “Indian Killer.” Indeed, much of Lowell’s work pays an acute attention to his various family members’ achievements and cruelties.
Robert Lowell attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940.
He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Lowell was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, where he served from 1947 until 1948. By 1967, he was one of the most public, well-known American poets, and in June of that year, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine as part of a lengthy cover story on American poetry in which he was praised as "the best American poet of his generation."
The Poem
This poem has a subjective narrator. "For the Union Dead" opens with the poet's childhood memory of the South Boston Aquarium, which by the time of Lowell's reading “stands in a Sahara of snow,” devoid of feelings in its physical decay. Its “broken windows are boarded” and “airy tanks are dry.”
The weathercock upon the building has lost its scales so that it no longer shows any direction: this is symbolic of Lowell's understanding of “progress” in the material American civilization. Images of emptiness and desolation intensify feelings of loss for a place that once offered hope and happiness.
Construction in Boston
In the second stanza, the poet recalls his childhood visit to the aquarium where he once rubbed his nose on the glass wall and wished he could break the bubbles that rose from the "cowed, compliant" fishes' mouths. The "fishy" occupants of the tanks are trapped and submissive, symbolic of people denied their essential freedoms.
The bubbles may represent many things the young boy considers "bursting" including the state of the American dream, values that people regard too unreal to be pursued, or even the heroism of the past. The kingdom of fish is literally heading “dark downwards” as they swim down and away from the aquarium light.
Lowell then remembers a time "last March" when he watched steam shovels "gouging" out underground parking garages and "shaking" the nearby landmarks such as the Statehouse and the statue of Colonel Shaw. The Boston Common itself, once a symbol of openness and community had become enclosed in “the new barbed and galvanized/ fence." The landscape of this massive urban renewal makes the poem autobiographical. Lowell is sympathetic to the past (his own upbringing), but he clearly belongs to the present.
It is evident that Lowell criticizes Boston's Irish-American present in comparison with the New England past. Boston itself was unsettled in 1960, especially by the changes wrought to the city's landscape and its lifestyle by a city government working to create a "New Boston" from the wreckage of what historian Thomas O'Connor has called "the ethnic ascendancy" of the 1920s through 1940s.
Helen Vendler, author and critic, interprets the poet's work ...
"With the disappearance of history as firm past reality, the poem tails off into the abjectness of a Boston now ruled by the immigrant Irish, who, like the skunks of Castine, have taken over territory formerly belonging to the Lowells and their kind. The Irish have defaced the historical Common on which Emerson had his transcendental vision; they have undermined the State House and the Saint Gaudens relief in order to build a parking garage; they have abandoned civic responsibility in letting the Aquarium decline; everywhere, reduced to the synecdoche of their vulgar automobiles, their 'savage servility / slides by on grease.'"
(Helen Vendler. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. 1995)
Vendler contends Lowell's anti-Irish statement shows a new commercialized history replacing an old ethical history. The bas-relief shakes, and the statues "grow slimmer and younger each year" so that they will, if the process continues, disappear altogether.... Christian language, the "Rock of Ages," is debased to gross advertisement, heartless in its appropriation of Hiroshima for commercial purposes.
In its stark description, "For the Union Dead" works through the decay and dissolution of Boston to stand for the loss of "a thousand small-town New England greens" in innumerable New England towns.
More broadly, the poem offers a sense that the modern American kingdom (of 1960) was also getting worse, darker, and less noble. "For the Union Dead" addresses the mode of American society as it regresses from the idealism of the nineteenth century to the despairing loss of it in the mid-twentieth century. The very image of the dilapidated landscape and the broken language reinforces this sense of breakdown of values. Everything is ruined, broken and bare, both literally and symbolically.
(Michael Thurston. "Robert Lowell's Monumental Vision: History, Poetic Form, and the Cultural
Work of Postwar Lyric," American Literary History. 2000)
Old South Boston Aquarium
Shaw died in the war, and his statue is a monument to the heroic ideals of New England life, which are jeopardized in the present just as the statue itself is shaken by urban renewal. Lowell contrasts Shaw’s heroism with contemporary forms of self-interest and greed. He laments the erosion of heroic idealism in contemporary America.
Later in the poem, the increasing modern romanticization of the Civil War, the "statues of the abstract Union Soldier" that "grow slimmer and younger each year," form a bitter contrast to the country's continuing indifference to racial injustice. That indifference is itself encouraged by a distancing medium: the television screen where frightened black faces, become, like the cast bronze of the statue, mere "balloons."
Images of black children entering segregated schools reveal how the ideals for which Shaw and his men died were neglected after the Civil War. Like the fish in the aquarium, they are separated from Lowell by a wall of glass. Implicitly, Lowell proposes this way of experiencing public reality as typical of our time.
What saves the poem from being smug and overly judgmental is the speaker's own confessed participation in the degradation he so scathingly observes: "When I crouch" -- he says as he offers the most startling image in the poem.
"When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons...
"a savage servility
slides by on grease."
Lowell realizes that humanity is reserved for those who suffer history, not those who make it. Lowell casts his lot, becoming one of "us" both in our "dark downward" reptilian aspects and our fragile and aspiring aspects -- locked in with the common and their humble fate, locked not so unhappily out of the Common as monument park, as cemetery.
The poem’s final stanzas return to the aquarium. The poet pictures Shaw riding on a fish’s air bubble, breaking free to the surface, but in fact, the aquarium is abandoned and the only fish are fin-tailed cars. Man no longer has dominion; in fact, he has descended to the lower order himself.
"giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease."
Thurston concludes ...
Shaw died in the war, and his statue is a monument to the heroic ideals of New England life, which are jeopardized in the present just as the statue itself is shaken by urban renewal. Lowell contrasts Shaw’s heroism with contemporary forms of self-interest and greed. He laments the erosion of heroic idealism in contemporary America.
Later in the poem, the increasing modern romanticization of the Civil War, the "statues of the abstract Union Soldier" that "grow slimmer and younger each year," form a bitter contrast to the country's continuing indifference to racial injustice. That indifference is itself encouraged by a distancing medium: the television screen where frightened black faces, become, like the cast bronze of the statue, mere "balloons."
Images of black children entering segregated schools reveal how the ideals for which Shaw and his men died were neglected after the Civil War. Like the fish in the aquarium, they are separated from Lowell by a wall of glass. Implicitly, Lowell proposes this way of experiencing public reality as typical of our time.
What saves the poem from being smug and overly judgmental is the speaker's own confessed participation in the degradation he so scathingly observes: "When I crouch" -- he says as he offers the most startling image in the poem.
"When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons...
"a savage servility
slides by on grease."
(Helen Vendler. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. 1995)
Lowell realizes that humanity is reserved for those who suffer history, not those who make it. Lowell casts his lot, becoming one of "us" both in our "dark downward" reptilian aspects and our fragile and aspiring aspects -- locked in with the common and their humble fate, locked not so unhappily out of the Common as monument park, as cemetery.
The poem’s final stanzas return to the aquarium. The poet pictures Shaw riding on a fish’s air bubble, breaking free to the surface, but in fact, the aquarium is abandoned and the only fish are fin-tailed cars. Man no longer has dominion; in fact, he has descended to the lower order himself.
"giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease."
Thurston concludes ...
"Lowell embraces all that threatens monuments and takes a breath, indeed takes up breath as
the better thing than sculpture for remembering history and making it live in our
difficult present. Or, better, he finds a way to make bronze breathe, to forge through the
poem's tautly structured openness a powerful connection between monument and the masses.
"Those who serve the republic, as the poem's epigraph has it, give up everything. But those
who see, remember, breathe and tell, those who bring history into the present not as
static statuary but as living speech, relinquish only their old hope of named, individual,
immortality."
(Michael Thurston. "Robert Lowell's Monumental Vision: History, Poetic Form, and the Cultural
Work of Postwar Lyric," American Literary History. 2000)
One hundred
years after Colonel Shaw's death, the Latin inscription on Saint-Gauden’s bas-relief of Shaw (the motto of the Society of the Cincinnati) is revised as the epigraph of Lowell's poem. In English,
the inscription (which Lowell revised for the poem) means, “He
leaves everything else to serve the republic." The original
inscription is: “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam” or “They
relinquish/ sacrifice everything to serve the Republic."
Thurston writes this interpretation:
"In his inanimate condition, (the statue) Shaw both guides (as a "compass needle") and endangers; ("a fishbone in the city's throat" of finned inhumanity). He threatens to choke Boston. He stands as a double warning: action, however heroic, once frozen in commemorative bronze is threatened by the present's new priorities; but whoso would so easily forget their history, whoso would sell their heroic birthright for a few parking spaces, becomes inhuman, reptilian or fishlike, savage and servile."
“For the Union Dead” received a great deal of national attention when Lowell chose it to be the title poem of his 1964 collection. The very fact that Lowell contrasts Shaw’s heroism with contemporary forms of self-interest and greed became a revelation for many.
Thurston writes this interpretation:
"In his inanimate condition, (the statue) Shaw both guides (as a "compass needle") and endangers; ("a fishbone in the city's throat" of finned inhumanity). He threatens to choke Boston. He stands as a double warning: action, however heroic, once frozen in commemorative bronze is threatened by the present's new priorities; but whoso would so easily forget their history, whoso would sell their heroic birthright for a few parking spaces, becomes inhuman, reptilian or fishlike, savage and servile."
(Michael Thurston. "Robert Lowell's Monumental Vision: History, Poetic Form, and the Cultural
Work of Postwar Lyric," American Literary History. 2000)
“For the Union Dead” received a great deal of national attention when Lowell chose it to be the title poem of his 1964 collection. The very fact that Lowell contrasts Shaw’s heroism with contemporary forms of self-interest and greed became a revelation for many.
Whatever student who said poems are whimsical constructions that lack guts and ire should read "For the Union Dead." It lived in 1960 in protest to the human conditions and dark powers of the time, and it lives today, 54 years later, to make us question how sacred values and actual freedoms intertwine.
Ideals, though mouthed by the masses and celebrated in monuments, often clash with present reality.
Ideals, though mouthed by the masses and celebrated in monuments, often clash with present reality.
Robert Gould Shaw lived, fought, died, and was buried with his men. As he and his family denied privilege in favor of right, they became an example of a living ideal. And, the sculpture by Saint-Gauden was a fitting tribute to the leader and his brave troops who fought for freedom. Yet, the act of consummating American liberty and justice continues today.
The poem makes us realize that studying history involves much more than gaining perspective on what happened in the past. It must also provide us lessons for using this historical reference to change positively the future. Words in books, stone in statues, or oratory from leaders become materials for our own growth and maturation... if considered in the light and not restricted to a kingdom that is "dark downward and vegetating."
The poem makes us realize that studying history involves much more than gaining perspective on what happened in the past. It must also provide us lessons for using this historical reference to change positively the future. Words in books, stone in statues, or oratory from leaders become materials for our own growth and maturation... if considered in the light and not restricted to a kingdom that is "dark downward and vegetating."
54th Massachusetts Regiment
Beginning
as a private meditation on his childhood memory of the Boston Aquarium,
'For the Union Dead' commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Shaw,
a Union officer killed while leading a regiment of black troops during
the Civil War. Shifting between the historic past and present, Lowell
laments the erosion of heroic idealism in contemporary America and
technological encroachment. - See more at:
http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/for-the-union-dead.html#sthash.PKrSnGsY.dpuf
No comments:
Post a Comment