Showing posts with label Massachusetts 20th Regiment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Massachusetts 20th Regiment. Show all posts

Saturday, April 13, 2019

*Poet's Corner-Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead"-In Honor Of The Union Side On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The Second Year Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to essay by poet and literary critic Helen Vendler about Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead".

Guest Commentary

On the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War in honor of the Northern armies that fought and died defending the union and/or the abolition of slavery a poem written by Robert Lowell during the Centenary in 1964. Markin

Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead- 1964


"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 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 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.

Friday, April 12, 2019

On The 158th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment (Also Called The "Bloody" 20th and "The Harvard Regiment")

Click on to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated April 10, 2011, about some Massachusetts regiments in the American Civil War.

Markin comment:


On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment ("The Harvard Regiment")

Saturday, April 07, 2012

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Second Year Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment (Also Called The "Bloody" 20th and "The Harvard Regiment")

Click on to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated April 10, 2011, about some Massachusetts regiments in the American Civil War.

Markin comment:

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment ("The Harvard Regiment")