Poems
For the Union Dead (1964)
For the Union Dead
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam1."
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 Common2. 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 James3 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 gently 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 Safe4, the “Rock of Ages5"
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.
(For the Union Dead, 1964)
1"They gave up all in order to serve for the Republic". The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial was built in 1897 in honour of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first all-Black regiment recruited in the North to fight for the Union army during the Civil War.
2Boston Common is Boston, Massachusetts' most famous public park and the oldest city park in the United States. It is 50 acres (202,000 m2) in size. The Common is bounded by Tremont St., Park St., Beacon St., Charles St., and Boylston St. A visitors' center for all of Boston is on the Tremont Street side of the park. Its purpose has changed over the years. Originally it was owned by William Blaxton (often given the modernized spelling "Blackstone") until it was bought from him by the city. It was used as a camp by the British before the Revolutionary War, and was where they left from for the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Up until 1830, it was used for cattle grazing. It was also used for public hangings up until 1817. Mary Dyer was hanged there in 1660. Today it serves as a public park for all to use for formal or informal gatherings, or just to enjoy the park and its surroundings. Events such as concerts, protests, softball games, and ice skating (on Frog Pond) often take place in the park. Famous individuals, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II, have also made speeches at the Common. Notable features of the Common: The Massachusetts State House stands across Beacon Street from the north edge of the Common. The Common forms the south foot of Beacon Hill. The monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry stands at Beacon and Park Streets, the northeast corner of the Common. The Boston Public Garden lies to the west of the Common, across Charles Street, and was originally considered an extension of the Common. Frog Pond, a public ice-skating rink in winter months. Park Street Station, the first subway station in America, stands at the northeast corner of the park. Likewise, Boylston Station at the southeast corner is America's second subway station. A Civil War monument stands in the north central part of the park. Boston Common is the south end of Boston's Freedom Trail. Parkman Bandstand, in the east part of the park, is commonly used in musical and theatrical productions in the park. The softball fields lie in the southwest corner of the Common. A grassy area forms the west part of the park, and is most commonly used for the park's largest events. A parking garage underlies this part of the Common. The Province of Nova Scotia has donated the annual Christmas tree for the Common as an enduring thank-you for the relief efforts of the Boston Red Cross and the Massachusetts Public Safety Committee following the Halifax Explosion of 1917.
3William James (January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. William James was born in New York City, son of Henry James, Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
4Mosler is a "safe" or "strongbox" manufacturer.
5"Rock of Ages" stands for Christ in the Holy Scripture.
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