Here
is a poem in honor of their sacrifice.
It’s by Robert Lowell, one of the leading American poets post
WWII. Perhaps ironically he was a conscientious
objector during WWII (even being jailed for it) and a strong Vietnam War
opponent. He was a pacifist, but even
pacifists honor war dead. Lowell, by the
way, converted to Roman Catholicism.
The poem describes coming upon the sculptured relief
of The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston.
Robert Shaw was a white Union Colonel who led a black infantry regiment
during the Civil War and was killed at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in
1863. The story of his regiment was dramatized
in the movie Glory.
The Latin inscription translates to “They leave all
behind to protect the state.”
For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell.
“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 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 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 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
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 blessèd break.
The Aquarium is
gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose
forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
The
poem is written in Lowell’s “confessional” style, that is from a very personal
perspective and casual phrasing. It’s
pure free verse with just natural American English rhythm. It’s a rather odd poem, but a fine one. He starts the poem with a visual of the
aquarium, which now has been boarded up and closed down. Time has passed; fishes are no longer there,
presumably dead, which leads in stream-of-conscious to think of long gone
dinosaurs. The fishes under water remind
of the dead soldiers of the regiment buried in a ditch. The sculpture stands almost alive, the truest
memorial.
Here
is a photo of the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Shaw and his regiment.
Lord,
remember our dead. May all of our
soldier’s sacrifices have been for noble causes and may they rest in eternal
peace with our deepest gratitude. Through
Christ, we pray.
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