For The Union Dead

• Relinquunt Omnia 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 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 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.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was an American poet and considered a major figure of the “Middle Generation” of poets, which included Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell. Lowell grew up a member of the esteemed “House of Lowell” of Boston — which included fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. An early student of Allen Tate, Lowell would also be influenced by William Carlos Williams and his friend, Elizabeth Bishop, whom he saw as a bridge between Tate’s formal and Williams’s informal style; Lowell wrote both structured and free verse throughout his career. (“For the Union Dead” can be read as counterpoint in style and theme to Tate’s more formal “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”) Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Lowell was a main contributor to the “confessional” school of poetry, which saw a poet’s (and others’) personal life as fair game for verse. His poems dealt with both personal and objective history, and often found their tension in the interplay between the two.