Poem: Robert Lowell

Yesterday's poem got me thinking about another poem that treats the US Civil War, a poem I had to read in high school and did not fully understand, could not really understand or bear, even, until I returned to it, and its author, in college. I speak of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), who had died only a decade before and whose name and fame were still widely known and accepted. They have both dimmed quite a bit since then, as his peer and friend, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1917), has seen her star ascend, and many of the poets of his generation (Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell, etc.) are even less invoked. (Another almost exact contemporary, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), has also become better known and canonical over the last 30 years.)  Lowell's career had many stages, controversies, summits and pits, but when he published the poem below, "For the Union Dead," in the eponymous 1964 volume, he was at the zenith of his fame.

Its title invokes his friend and former teacher Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," while also touching upon many of Lowell's touchstones: Boston, especially the city of his youth; New England and its place in the country; political and social liberalism, and his own conflicts concerning his and the country's difficulties in grappling with race and racism; modernization and the shifts the country was experiencing; his own aging; the power and limits of art to invoke, witness, imagine, commemorate; and so much more. Formally, it shows his shift to the looser, more open style of his mid-career, while still demonstrating his skill as a versifier, his sureness of meter, rhetoric, figure.  His use of the "n" word still jars, but far less; I think it stopped me when I was a teenager, tearing more at the wound that its use in other circumstances--by white classmates, in books like Huckleberry Finn and Wallace Stevens's poetry--had already created. Now I can see why it was necessary, for Lowell, here. The national wound that Shaw and the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry confronted in 1863, reanimated so vividly in the 1989 film Glory (which won Denzel Washington his first Academy Award) still festers to some degree, though their bravery and that of all who fought and won that terrible war has gone a long way--including, at the moment of this poem's writing, during the Civil Rights Movement, which involved those "Negro children" on the TV Lowell cites--towards suturing if not fully healing it.


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 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.


From Life Studies and For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell, published by Noonday Press (a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.). Copyright © 1964 by Robert Lowell. All rights reserved.

Poem: Robert Lowell

Another poet we'll be looking at next week is Robert Lowell (1917-1977). When I was in junior high and high school in the 1980s, Lowell was still considered one of the most important poets of the era, though I'm not so sure that's the case these days; his presence and influence, as a versifier, as a teacher and mentor, and as a public poet and figure, were all still fresh, and his linguistic and lyric fluency, his personal and public aesthetic transformations, his larger-than-life personae and voice were all invoked by my teachers as models of what an American poet might be.

We read "For the Union Dead," of course, one of his greatest poems, and "Skunk Hour," and a a number of his other poems, and we talked about "confessional poetry," which was then somehow still controversial, rather than normative and passé--does anyone even blink an eye these days when poets put all their business on the page or screen, and thus in the (virtual) street?--though Lowell had been angling at confessionalism from the very beginning, with his family, one of the most prominent in New England and 19th century America, as his starting point. By the 1990s, though, Lowell's multiple marriages and lifelong nuttiness were the story, rather than the poetry. I sometimes wonder if he's taught or discussed as he once was. (When I suggested adding him to my syllabus, one friend, a scholar, seemed a bit chary.) One of my senior colleagues did tell me that in a graduate course on 19th and 20th century American poetry she recently taught, Lowell (like Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop) was one of the post-WW II poets she looked at (the others were Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery); is this the case elsewhere?

One of the poems we'll be looking at is one of my favorites by Lowell, from Life Studies, which captures his voice public stance and voice so perfectly, "Memories of West Street and Lepke." The poem recounts his reflection, from the vantage point of the 1950s in Boston, of the year he spent as a conscientious objector in a New York jail. Every beat and every image in the poem carries the charge of irony, of the deflation of middle age and unsettled retrospection that would blossom some years later in the even more candid lyrics of The Dolphin and similar books. (Of course there were certain things he would never confess, such as the fact that one of his most outrageous episodes of madness, at Yaddo, might have been provoked in part by his sleeping with a notable Black Chicago painter, Charles Sebree.)

I also think of Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop (tomorrow!), which I taught several years ago in another class, and how dismissive and horrified he was of the "passionate" young poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who paid a visit to his Boston home--they were, in their teeming filthiness and enthusiasm a bit much, a connection that could not fully occur, for the always-to-the-end haut bourgeois Brahmin. Now, the poem:

 
Memories of West Street and Lepke
 
 Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections....

Copyright © Robert Lowell, 1959. All rights reserved.