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For the Union Dead
For the Union Dead is a well-known 1964 poem by Robert Lowell, published in a book of the same name and originally written for the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 where Lowell first read it in public.The title references Allen Tate's 1928 poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead."
The setting of the poem is the Boston Common near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. In the poem, Lowell's visit to the park leads to a series of associations that the dug-up park conjures. First, watching the construction of the underground parking garage beneath the Common makes him think about his childhood and how Boston had changed; in particular, the South Boston Aquarium that he'd visited as a child had recently been demolished in 1954.This leads him to think about the Robert Gould Shaw memorial and the history associated with the memorial (including Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led). Finally, Lowell thinks of the then-controversial civil rights movement and the images of the integration of black and white schoolchildren that Lowell had recently seen on television.
The final lines of the poem, which read, "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease" are particularly well-known for their rather dark description of the large American cars that were popular at the time.
The setting of the poem is the Boston Common near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. In the poem, Lowell's visit to the park leads to a series of associations that the dug-up park conjures. First, watching the construction of the underground parking garage beneath the Common makes him think about his childhood and how Boston had changed; in particular, the South Boston Aquarium that he'd visited as a child had recently been demolished in 1954.This leads him to think about the Robert Gould Shaw memorial and the history associated with the memorial (including Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led). Finally, Lowell thinks of the then-controversial civil rights movement and the images of the integration of black and white schoolchildren that Lowell had recently seen on television.
The final lines of the poem, which read, "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease" are particularly well-known for their rather dark description of the large American cars that were popular at the time.
72 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
3 people are currently reading
228 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lowell
183 books269 followersRobert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 23, 2022
What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.
Lowell perfected his voice, placing his personal situations amidst the riptide and churn of History, one as tempestuous as the Bard or Vico might find it, though perhaps partially obscured by empty gin bottles and old issues of the Partisan Review. I read this on a Saturday night when the day's labor left me enervated but astir. Loss had been the lesson of the day. Hopefully my notes were adequate.
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.
Lowell perfected his voice, placing his personal situations amidst the riptide and churn of History, one as tempestuous as the Bard or Vico might find it, though perhaps partially obscured by empty gin bottles and old issues of the Partisan Review. I read this on a Saturday night when the day's labor left me enervated but astir. Loss had been the lesson of the day. Hopefully my notes were adequate.
July 23, 2021
This is my favorite of Lowell’s books of poetry.
Most of the poems included here are clear and don’t have the opacity that can overwhelm many of Lowell’s other works.
So outstanding imagery and mastery of poem construction. Not often that you see such consistently good poems with all of the aforementioned attributes in one single book of poetry.
5 stars
Most of the poems included here are clear and don’t have the opacity that can overwhelm many of Lowell’s other works.
So outstanding imagery and mastery of poem construction. Not often that you see such consistently good poems with all of the aforementioned attributes in one single book of poetry.
5 stars
April 8, 2019
The tag next to Robert Lowell's corpus in the museum of literary history designates him the most influential American poet of the 20th century's second half—less the founder of a school (Confessional Poetry) than an author the gravity of whose work legitimated anyone who followed him in abandoning the modernist impersonality extolled by Eliot and exploring instead the uncharted paths among personal experience, poetic form, and history.
Lowell's contemporaries and successors could have gotten this from, say, Ginsberg or other Beats, the "raw" poets Lowell himself praised, but I wonder if they needed to hear it from a writer with Lowell's command of traditional verse form and (dare I say?) Boston Brahmin pedigree. And this scion of Puritans and Transcendentalists, temporary Catholic convert though he was (hence "Confessional," perhaps), reminds us that suffering inwardness and commitment to self-expression defined American literature from the start. From one of my favorite poems in For the Union Dead, "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts":
Lowell does Hawthorne too:
These two poems on historical predecessors, in second and third person respectively, "confess" only at a distance, vicariously. They set the tone, formally and affectively, for the poetry of their time, in part still our time.
Formally: note the more or less free verse, structured not by strict rhyming or metrical schemes but by a consistent weave of consonance, assonance, and slant-rhyme binding the poem internally sans line-ending rivets. (Lowell was internationally renowned, too, and Heaney and Walcott might have done it better, but they credited Lowell's influence.)
Affectively: note the distanced, ironized pity (ultimately self-pity) for the marginal poet-intellectual, observing the world-soul in common things with furrowed brow, even though the world doesn't heed or understand. Lowell dramatizes and elegizes the position of the postmodern poet, so concerned for us all and yet so bereft of any power to transform even himself, let alone society.
Lowell's poetry is as political as it is personal—it is a thinking-through of how history is refracted in his individual experience—but its way of being political reifies and reinforces its own social isolation. The poet's doleful, theatrical public despair, as in the nuclear war lament "Fall 1961," aestheticizes and therefore relishes itself, in a gesture I've also observed in the work of Lowell's contemporary, Adrienne Rich:
With Lowell and with Rich, you get the feeling that these ostensible radicals enjoy the conditions they decry as an occasion for their elaborate performances of sorrow and anger. And I object not to the enjoyment—I'm not a moralist; I expect only perversity from people—it's the bad-faith posture of self-pitying and lonely enlightenment, which was not always the only tone literary artists could strike in public, but which now is, for which Lowell must share some blame.
Contrast, for instance, Lowell's friend and correspondent Elizabeth Bishop, with her much more thorough and self-implicating verbal irony (her poems are often self-cancelling metafictional artifacts) wedded to the sometimes distastefully if wryly jocular laying-down-the-law swagger you find only in the very best poets ("Somebody loves us all"). In short, my argument is Nietzsche, not Marx: better the open proclamation than the dissimulation of power and how it gets that way, whether aesthetic or political.
Take the remarkable conclusion to Lowell's "Florence," a tribute to the city that ends with the speaker's declaration of allegiance to the villains of Classical and Biblical history:
I recently read an interview with a young writer. Her interlocutor asked her who her favorite villain was, and she refused the premise of the question by arguing that villains have been assigned that role by the powers that be and were probably just misunderstood. Here we see what for Lowell at midcentury was a striking poetic insight (see also Bishop's extraordinary "Man-Moth") curdle to our contemporary doxa.
Identification with monsters is now the ideology of mom and dad as they approach their soft middle age—hence the current moral panic about the arrival of real monsters: restive youth choosing communism, fascism, left or right identitarianism, left or right libertarianism, trad-Catholicism, or any other ideology that rejects this now complacent "compulsory transgression" unconvincingly proposed by the buttoned-up professionals (hardly the outcast villains) of an increasingly centralized and ideologically monocultural literary-academic world.
Modern art is reactive, which is why it is revolutionary. The embourgeoisement of marginality's signifiers, of the nose ring, the tattoo, the blue-dyed hair, the superhero comics and the horror movies, and the aesthetics of queerness and blackness in general, is the ideological crisis of our age. Whatever was once fresh and vital in a range of rebellious midcentury writing, from Lowell and Bishop to Ginsberg and Kerouac to Baldwin and O'Connor to Le Guin and Delany to Shirley Jackson and early Marvel Comics, has now, along with Marvel's intellectual property itself, become boring, middlebrow, middle class, suburban, and profitable to the present power structure. Aesthetes (and almost all political radicals whatever their politics are aesthetes in denial) won't be bored—if necessary, they won't-be-bored to death. And people wonder why the new avant-gardes, like the old ones, are illiberal.
Lowell is eloquent, but has too little conceptual or verbal power in his poetry (though he was radical enough in his life, willing to be jailed for his convictions) to resist this hijacking-by-smug-boredom of his worldview. Someone—Hayden Carruth, perhaps—once said that poets can never be liberal or conservative, but only revolutionary or reactionary.
But Lowell undeniably produces some magnificent poetry. These poems' vein of nature imagery especially stands out, and is also no less historico-political (surely someone has done "Reading Lowell in the Anthropocene" by now). The non-cuddly denizens of the non-human world persistently catch Lowell's interest (if the spiders come from Jonathan Edwards, do the turtles come from D. H. Lawrence?) and offer a more persuasive corollary than mere "monsters" for all that the oppressively civilized world (including poetry, represented by the Keatsian urn below) abjects:
The personal, the natural, and the political all come together in the final, titular poem, one of Lowell's most famous, his elegiac portrait of a modernizing Boston (or America at large) where automobiles have replaced marine vitality and segregation has displaced the moral fanaticism that defeated the slave power:
Some say the descendants of Lowell—white American liberals—are undergoing another moral awakening like that which preceded the Civil War. And with my own brand of marginal and aestheticized bad-faith radicalism, forged in protest against the Bush administration's militarism, justified as it was with reference to progress and democracy, I have been skeptical of some of our own recent Civil War kitsch and nostalgia. Not, I assure you, from any sympathy with the Confederacy (or the Taliban or the Ba'ath Party), but from a conviction that we should find some way to solve our problems without mass slaughter.
Yet as a palpable, habitable locus for this feeling of sublimity in the presence of a spirit like Robert Gould Shaw's, "For the Union Dead" confesses more about personal experience's union with history than any other discourse possibly could. There are perhaps better poets—I have named them above: Heaney, Walcott, Bishop—but Lowell's more fractious and precarious persona, albeit occasionally irritating, makes him a superbly alert witness to his—our—times.
Lowell's contemporaries and successors could have gotten this from, say, Ginsberg or other Beats, the "raw" poets Lowell himself praised, but I wonder if they needed to hear it from a writer with Lowell's command of traditional verse form and (dare I say?) Boston Brahmin pedigree. And this scion of Puritans and Transcendentalists, temporary Catholic convert though he was (hence "Confessional," perhaps), reminds us that suffering inwardness and commitment to self-expression defined American literature from the start. From one of my favorite poems in For the Union Dead, "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts":
As a boy you built a booth
in a swamp for prayer;
lying on your back,
you saw the spiders fly,
basking at their ease,
swimming from tree to tree—
so high, they seemed tacked to the sky.
You knew they would die.
Poor country Berkeley at Yale,
you saw the world was soul,
the soul of God! The soul
of Sarah Pierrepont!
Lowell does Hawthorne too:
Leave him alone for a moment or two,
and you'll see him with his head
bent down, brooding, brooding,
eyes fixed on some chip,
some stone, some common plant,
the commonest thing,
as if it were the clue.
These two poems on historical predecessors, in second and third person respectively, "confess" only at a distance, vicariously. They set the tone, formally and affectively, for the poetry of their time, in part still our time.
Formally: note the more or less free verse, structured not by strict rhyming or metrical schemes but by a consistent weave of consonance, assonance, and slant-rhyme binding the poem internally sans line-ending rivets. (Lowell was internationally renowned, too, and Heaney and Walcott might have done it better, but they credited Lowell's influence.)
Affectively: note the distanced, ironized pity (ultimately self-pity) for the marginal poet-intellectual, observing the world-soul in common things with furrowed brow, even though the world doesn't heed or understand. Lowell dramatizes and elegizes the position of the postmodern poet, so concerned for us all and yet so bereft of any power to transform even himself, let alone society.
Lowell's poetry is as political as it is personal—it is a thinking-through of how history is refracted in his individual experience—but its way of being political reifies and reinforces its own social isolation. The poet's doleful, theatrical public despair, as in the nuclear war lament "Fall 1961," aestheticizes and therefore relishes itself, in a gesture I've also observed in the work of Lowell's contemporary, Adrienne Rich:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.
A father's no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.
With Lowell and with Rich, you get the feeling that these ostensible radicals enjoy the conditions they decry as an occasion for their elaborate performances of sorrow and anger. And I object not to the enjoyment—I'm not a moralist; I expect only perversity from people—it's the bad-faith posture of self-pitying and lonely enlightenment, which was not always the only tone literary artists could strike in public, but which now is, for which Lowell must share some blame.
Contrast, for instance, Lowell's friend and correspondent Elizabeth Bishop, with her much more thorough and self-implicating verbal irony (her poems are often self-cancelling metafictional artifacts) wedded to the sometimes distastefully if wryly jocular laying-down-the-law swagger you find only in the very best poets ("Somebody loves us all"). In short, my argument is Nietzsche, not Marx: better the open proclamation than the dissimulation of power and how it gets that way, whether aesthetic or political.
Take the remarkable conclusion to Lowell's "Florence," a tribute to the city that ends with the speaker's declaration of allegiance to the villains of Classical and Biblical history:
Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyranicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side—
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many David and Judiths!
My heart bleeds for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her severed head swung
like a lantern in the victor’s hand.
I recently read an interview with a young writer. Her interlocutor asked her who her favorite villain was, and she refused the premise of the question by arguing that villains have been assigned that role by the powers that be and were probably just misunderstood. Here we see what for Lowell at midcentury was a striking poetic insight (see also Bishop's extraordinary "Man-Moth") curdle to our contemporary doxa.
Identification with monsters is now the ideology of mom and dad as they approach their soft middle age—hence the current moral panic about the arrival of real monsters: restive youth choosing communism, fascism, left or right identitarianism, left or right libertarianism, trad-Catholicism, or any other ideology that rejects this now complacent "compulsory transgression" unconvincingly proposed by the buttoned-up professionals (hardly the outcast villains) of an increasingly centralized and ideologically monocultural literary-academic world.
Modern art is reactive, which is why it is revolutionary. The embourgeoisement of marginality's signifiers, of the nose ring, the tattoo, the blue-dyed hair, the superhero comics and the horror movies, and the aesthetics of queerness and blackness in general, is the ideological crisis of our age. Whatever was once fresh and vital in a range of rebellious midcentury writing, from Lowell and Bishop to Ginsberg and Kerouac to Baldwin and O'Connor to Le Guin and Delany to Shirley Jackson and early Marvel Comics, has now, along with Marvel's intellectual property itself, become boring, middlebrow, middle class, suburban, and profitable to the present power structure. Aesthetes (and almost all political radicals whatever their politics are aesthetes in denial) won't be bored—if necessary, they won't-be-bored to death. And people wonder why the new avant-gardes, like the old ones, are illiberal.
Lowell is eloquent, but has too little conceptual or verbal power in his poetry (though he was radical enough in his life, willing to be jailed for his convictions) to resist this hijacking-by-smug-boredom of his worldview. Someone—Hayden Carruth, perhaps—once said that poets can never be liberal or conservative, but only revolutionary or reactionary.
But Lowell undeniably produces some magnificent poetry. These poems' vein of nature imagery especially stands out, and is also no less historico-political (surely someone has done "Reading Lowell in the Anthropocene" by now). The non-cuddly denizens of the non-human world persistently catch Lowell's interest (if the spiders come from Jonathan Edwards, do the turtles come from D. H. Lawrence?) and offer a more persuasive corollary than mere "monsters" for all that the oppressively civilized world (including poetry, represented by the Keatsian urn below) abjects:
Oh neo-classical white urn, Oh nymph,
Oh lute! The boy was pitiless who strummed
their elegy,
for as the month wore on,
the turtles rose,
and popped up dead on the stale scummed
surface—limp wrinkled heads and legs withdrawn
in pain. What pain? A turtle's nothing. No
grace, no cerebration, less freedom will
than the mosquito I must kill—
nothings! Turtles! I rub my skull,
that turtle shell,
and breathe their dying smell,
still watch their crippled survivors pass,
and hobble humpbacked through the grizzled grass.
The personal, the natural, and the political all come together in the final, titular poem, one of Lowell's most famous, his elegiac portrait of a modernizing Boston (or America at large) where automobiles have replaced marine vitality and segregation has displaced the moral fanaticism that defeated the slave power:
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.
[…]
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.
Some say the descendants of Lowell—white American liberals—are undergoing another moral awakening like that which preceded the Civil War. And with my own brand of marginal and aestheticized bad-faith radicalism, forged in protest against the Bush administration's militarism, justified as it was with reference to progress and democracy, I have been skeptical of some of our own recent Civil War kitsch and nostalgia. Not, I assure you, from any sympathy with the Confederacy (or the Taliban or the Ba'ath Party), but from a conviction that we should find some way to solve our problems without mass slaughter.
Yet as a palpable, habitable locus for this feeling of sublimity in the presence of a spirit like Robert Gould Shaw's, "For the Union Dead" confesses more about personal experience's union with history than any other discourse possibly could. There are perhaps better poets—I have named them above: Heaney, Walcott, Bishop—but Lowell's more fractious and precarious persona, albeit occasionally irritating, makes him a superbly alert witness to his—our—times.
March 13, 2018
These are poems that make me feel so close to their author that I find myself quite taken aback when I'm forced to remember "Robert Lowell is dead." I love the sense of horror and wonder in his poems. Lowell sees a world rife with trouble and pain and yet replete with beauty and wonder. Spiders are mentioned several times in the book, and yet they feel like omnipresent companions, reminders that nature permeates our lives and watches, immutable.
January 22, 2022
Now the midwinter grind
is on me, New York
drills my nerves,
as I walk
the chewed-up streets.
At forty-five,
what next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
You never climbed
Mount Sion, yet left
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.
* * *
I long for the black ink,
cuttlefish, April, Communists
and brothels of Florence -
everything, even the British
fairies who haunted the hills,
even the chills and fever
that came once a month
and forced me to think.
The apple was more human there than here,
but it took a long time for the blinding
golden rind to mellow.
How vulnerable the horseshoe crabs
dredging the bottom like flat-irons
in their antique armor,
with their swordgrass blackbone tails,
made for a child to grab
and throw strangling ashore!
Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyranicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven,
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many Davids and Judiths!
My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her served head swung
like a lantern in the victor's hand.
* * *
Think of Leonidas perhaps and the hoplites
glittering with liberation,
as the combed one another's golden Botticellian
hair at Thermopylae - friends and lovers,
the bride and the bridegroom -
and moved into position to die.
* * *
This might be nature - twenty stories high,
two water tanks, tanned shingle, corsetted
by stapled pasture wire, while bed to bed,
we two, one cell here, lie
gazing into the ether's crystal ball,
sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death -
my heart stops . . .
This might be heaven. Years ago,
we aimed for less and settled for
a picture, out of style then and now in,
of seven daffodils. We watched them blow:
buttercup yellow were the flowers, and green
the stems as fresh paint, over them the wind,
the blousy wooden branches of the elms,
high summer in the breath that overwhelms
the termites digging in the underpinning . . .
Still over us, still in parenthesis,
this sack of hornets sopping up the flame,
still over us our breath,
sawing and pumping to the terminal,
and down below, we two, two in one waterdrop
vitalised by a needle drop of blood,
up, up, up, up and up,
soon shot, soon slugged into the overflow
that sets the wooden workshoe working here below.
is on me, New York
drills my nerves,
as I walk
the chewed-up streets.
At forty-five,
what next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
You never climbed
Mount Sion, yet left
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.
- Middle Age, pg. 7
* * *
I long for the black ink,
cuttlefish, April, Communists
and brothels of Florence -
everything, even the British
fairies who haunted the hills,
even the chills and fever
that came once a month
and forced me to think.
The apple was more human there than here,
but it took a long time for the blinding
golden rind to mellow.
How vulnerable the horseshoe crabs
dredging the bottom like flat-irons
in their antique armor,
with their swordgrass blackbone tails,
made for a child to grab
and throw strangling ashore!
Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyranicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven,
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many Davids and Judiths!
My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her served head swung
like a lantern in the victor's hand.
- Florence, for Mary McCarthy, pg. 13-14
* * *
Think of Leonidas perhaps and the hoplites
glittering with liberation,
as the combed one another's golden Botticellian
hair at Thermopylae - friends and lovers,
the bride and the bridegroom -
and moved into position to die.
- Epigram, for Hannah Arendt, pg. 23
* * *
This might be nature - twenty stories high,
two water tanks, tanned shingle, corsetted
by stapled pasture wire, while bed to bed,
we two, one cell here, lie
gazing into the ether's crystal ball,
sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death -
my heart stops . . .
This might be heaven. Years ago,
we aimed for less and settled for
a picture, out of style then and now in,
of seven daffodils. We watched them blow:
buttercup yellow were the flowers, and green
the stems as fresh paint, over them the wind,
the blousy wooden branches of the elms,
high summer in the breath that overwhelms
the termites digging in the underpinning . . .
Still over us, still in parenthesis,
this sack of hornets sopping up the flame,
still over us our breath,
sawing and pumping to the terminal,
and down below, we two, two in one waterdrop
vitalised by a needle drop of blood,
up, up, up, up and up,
soon shot, soon slugged into the overflow
that sets the wooden workshoe working here below.
- New York 1962: Fragment, pg. 65
December 26, 2023
The epigraph which says: "They gave up all to serve the republic" introduces the poem. Lowell imaginatively takes the Latin phrase scratched in the actual Civil War memorial. The Union soldiers were from the north, and wanted for all of the states (northern and southern) to remain part of the Republic.
The Confederates, the opposition from the south, wanted to break away from the Republic. The Union supported President Lincoln's decision to abolish slavery, the Confederates did not.
Colonel Robert Shaw was recruited by Governor John Andrew in 1863 to lead one of the Civil War's first all-African American troops. This unit was renamed the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. The 54th Infantry Regiment marched through Boston before heading to South Carolina, where Shaw was assassinated near Charleston.
Lowell prepares his readers in the first stanza by drawing a contrast between the ideals Shaw fought for and the world Lowell sees. Lowell uses alliteration twice in the second line ("Sahara... snow" and "broken... boarded") to further heighten the unforgiving and cold environment of this modern Boston.
He completes that stanza with fish tanks that have dried up, as if the tanks have served their purpose. Lowell reflects on childhood memories of watching fish and reptiles in the aquarium in the second stanza, and he connects this through enjambment to the next stanza, in which construction is encroaching on the Boston skyline.
The narrator begins in the ruins of the South Boston Aquarium, recalling memories from the past, then shifts to the near-present, a day 'last March." The narrator reflects on the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, which honours Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Union's first black regiment.
The sculpture's figures appear to 'breathe' life, sending a vivid, personal, and disturbing rerninder of death and sacrifice.
According to Lowell, more than half of the regiment was killed in the first two months of the battle. The Memorial hits home in a primal way that contrasts abruptly with its counterparts in New England's'small- town... greens,' which appear'sparse' and sleepy in comparison. Colonel Shaw, the white commander, was buried in a mass grave, a "ditch," along with his black soldiers, according to the poem. This was all Shaw's father wanted.
In Boston Common, there are no more recent war memorials. The poem ends in an unusual manner, and the content expands in ways that challenge the reader and complicate interpretation.
Colonel Shaw is reconnected with the drained faces of 'Negro school children' through images of balloons and bubbles, foreshadowing an impending rupture.
The poem returns to the closed aquarium, implying that the fish that once fascinated the narrator have been replaced by the 'giant finned cars' that appear 'everywhere,' leaving the reader to infer his own conclusion.
The Confederates, the opposition from the south, wanted to break away from the Republic. The Union supported President Lincoln's decision to abolish slavery, the Confederates did not.
Colonel Robert Shaw was recruited by Governor John Andrew in 1863 to lead one of the Civil War's first all-African American troops. This unit was renamed the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. The 54th Infantry Regiment marched through Boston before heading to South Carolina, where Shaw was assassinated near Charleston.
Lowell prepares his readers in the first stanza by drawing a contrast between the ideals Shaw fought for and the world Lowell sees. Lowell uses alliteration twice in the second line ("Sahara... snow" and "broken... boarded") to further heighten the unforgiving and cold environment of this modern Boston.
He completes that stanza with fish tanks that have dried up, as if the tanks have served their purpose. Lowell reflects on childhood memories of watching fish and reptiles in the aquarium in the second stanza, and he connects this through enjambment to the next stanza, in which construction is encroaching on the Boston skyline.
The narrator begins in the ruins of the South Boston Aquarium, recalling memories from the past, then shifts to the near-present, a day 'last March." The narrator reflects on the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, which honours Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Union's first black regiment.
The sculpture's figures appear to 'breathe' life, sending a vivid, personal, and disturbing rerninder of death and sacrifice.
According to Lowell, more than half of the regiment was killed in the first two months of the battle. The Memorial hits home in a primal way that contrasts abruptly with its counterparts in New England's'small- town... greens,' which appear'sparse' and sleepy in comparison. Colonel Shaw, the white commander, was buried in a mass grave, a "ditch," along with his black soldiers, according to the poem. This was all Shaw's father wanted.
In Boston Common, there are no more recent war memorials. The poem ends in an unusual manner, and the content expands in ways that challenge the reader and complicate interpretation.
Colonel Shaw is reconnected with the drained faces of 'Negro school children' through images of balloons and bubbles, foreshadowing an impending rupture.
The poem returns to the closed aquarium, implying that the fish that once fascinated the narrator have been replaced by the 'giant finned cars' that appear 'everywhere,' leaving the reader to infer his own conclusion.
March 1, 2025
a collection of poems by robert lowell that i picked from the the used bookstore footnote books in hillcrest. i enjoyed the different settings that these poems took place in, from the american south to a train on the way to paris. i'll be doing some reason about the author too to learn the worldview that shaped this work. i am a fan of the amount biblical references, specifically the garden of eden i noticed a few times, it feels dated (published 1956) in a good way, a different generation. with that, i felt like i was missing some historical context and knowledge of events/figures. growing up in catholic school i was informed enough about the religious references but beyond that i wish i had more knowledge about other us and world history events so it served as some inspiration for me to read more nonfiction. enjoyable but i dont think it will really stick with me unless i really annotated and analyzed as i read.
December 11, 2018
This was my first reading of a book of poetry by Robert Lowell. I'd been familiar with his name for years and his books were often recommended to me. In this collection, Lowell covers a broad range of topics across these poems, namely social issues and historical subjects, while still a few other poems are of a confessional nature.
I'm glad that I took the time to finally request one of his many poetry collections from the library. I've now read it through more than a few times and have come to appreciate it more with each reading. There are several poems which stood out for me in this book, three in particular - 'The Drinker', 'Hawthorne' and 'The Severed Head'. Both 'Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts' and the title poem impress me as both timeless and memorable as well.
A great collection that I'll look forward to reading again.
I'm glad that I took the time to finally request one of his many poetry collections from the library. I've now read it through more than a few times and have come to appreciate it more with each reading. There are several poems which stood out for me in this book, three in particular - 'The Drinker', 'Hawthorne' and 'The Severed Head'. Both 'Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts' and the title poem impress me as both timeless and memorable as well.
A great collection that I'll look forward to reading again.
August 16, 2019
Read this the other day while bookselling. Truthfully, only the eponymous poem warrants these two stars--the rest, though with an occasional shining line, is so dated as to feel like its from another century of pure fuddy-duddy recitation in drawing room cambric. This is a man who is a contemporary of Jack Spicer/Berryman (this collection is from '64, 5 years after Spicer's After Lorca the same year as the first book of The Dream Songs, and nearly ten years after Howl, for some points of relative reference) and it seems Lowell really can't take a hint even when it's a scream--everyone else has jumped ship for contemporary and relevant aesthetics while Lowell dodders behind on stilted rhymes. Amazing he has any reputation at all.
February 2, 2026
Definitely a let-down from "Life Studies."
Lowell chose to laud the gods and mythology of Greece, wax long on muses, and historical figures, and got more academic in his verses than his first collection, making these poems less reader-friendly. His most well-known poem "For the Union Dead" is the last poem in the collection and follows his other poems in their ekphrastic inspiration (this on a bronze sculpture in Washington, DC). And it is probably the best poem in the collection.
I read both books to gain some insight into Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (she's next on the TBRs). I don't know that these poems will help in that endeavor (although, I think both of them were no longer his students at the time he wrote many of these).
Need to check that fact.
Lowell chose to laud the gods and mythology of Greece, wax long on muses, and historical figures, and got more academic in his verses than his first collection, making these poems less reader-friendly. His most well-known poem "For the Union Dead" is the last poem in the collection and follows his other poems in their ekphrastic inspiration (this on a bronze sculpture in Washington, DC). And it is probably the best poem in the collection.
I read both books to gain some insight into Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (she's next on the TBRs). I don't know that these poems will help in that endeavor (although, I think both of them were no longer his students at the time he wrote many of these).
Need to check that fact.
February 4, 2025
Delicate, heady and intense poems that I feel like I could go back to again and again, and study with fervour. Needs a quiet room so you can speak aloud.
Musings on the usuals- death, childhood, love... the ones who come before, the ones who come after. In many ways this nuclear era he speaks of is akin to our strange and foreign world, with its constant threat of apocalypse and political, technocratic upheaval.
Musings on the usuals- death, childhood, love... the ones who come before, the ones who come after. In many ways this nuclear era he speaks of is akin to our strange and foreign world, with its constant threat of apocalypse and political, technocratic upheaval.
May 12, 2020
Shed skin will never fit another wearer.
In For the Union Dead, Lowell balances the historical allusions and symbolism of modernism with the conversational intimacy and confessional style popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Highlights include the title poem, "Beyond the Alps," "The Old Flame," and "Caligula."
In For the Union Dead, Lowell balances the historical allusions and symbolism of modernism with the conversational intimacy and confessional style popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Highlights include the title poem, "Beyond the Alps," "The Old Flame," and "Caligula."
September 7, 2018
I really liked this collection and continues Lowell's confessional writings.
November 18, 2018
A tad "problematic" in parts but it's still sort of Robert Lowell using his powers for good
February 18, 2019
nothing is on fire
January 24, 2023
Yoğun şiddet dolu bir dil, soluk alıp verebildiğini duyduğum şiirler ve beni sözcük seçimleriyle şok içinde bırakan Ali Cengizkan çevirisi…
October 22, 2023
At every corner,
I meet my Father
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
I meet my Father
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
June 21, 2024
Some beautiful lines but it felt very dated
July 16, 2025
Dipping into Lowell again lately. 2025.
2025 notes: quite a good book overall, though sometimes Lowell’s images are more beautiful and strong than they are “sensible”. There are a few poems that feel like a competition with (or emulation of?) Elizabeth Bishop’s work, a poet whose work is stridently overrated. (Her prose is better than her poems.) And I’m often irritated by the way Lowell begins a poem with rhyme and then too casually drops it. While that might be a kind of image for the progress of his career from form to “free” verse, it also feels lazy. Still, these poems—and much of Lowell’s work—are so superior to the prosy, unmusical meandering thoughts that have stood in for poetry in the past 60 years that its strength is undeniable.
2025 notes: quite a good book overall, though sometimes Lowell’s images are more beautiful and strong than they are “sensible”. There are a few poems that feel like a competition with (or emulation of?) Elizabeth Bishop’s work, a poet whose work is stridently overrated. (Her prose is better than her poems.) And I’m often irritated by the way Lowell begins a poem with rhyme and then too casually drops it. While that might be a kind of image for the progress of his career from form to “free” verse, it also feels lazy. Still, these poems—and much of Lowell’s work—are so superior to the prosy, unmusical meandering thoughts that have stood in for poetry in the past 60 years that its strength is undeniable.
February 23, 2009
Reminds me of a lighthearted (maybe) Wallace Stevens. Not really my style, but still mesmerizing sometimes. Has the effect of making me feel more stupid than usual.
August 6, 2010
Clearly a master poet, still... this set left me not as engaged as I like to be with poetry.
April 3, 2012
I liked most of the Poems. I will have to write down my favorite poem before I return it to the Library.
May 1, 2019
My first true exposure to Lowell. Enjoyed this quite a bit, especially “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts.”
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