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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Paul Kavanagh's recent article on Robert Lowell's ‘For the Union Dead’ clearly shows the relevance of Colonel Shaw's sacrifice to the poem and usefully emphasizes its Civil War associations. What is perhaps less clear in his investigation is Lowell's debt to the present, and the extent to which that debt ultimately defines the direction of the poem. Early in his study, for example, Kavanagh remarks ‘Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw’: it may be added that the two structures are physically present on Beacon Hill above Boston Common where the garage was built, and, although contrary to the implication in the poem they were not propped up because of the excavation, they do face each other across Beacon Street in dramatic – or ironic – contrast. Yet there are many such contrasts in the poem, expressed or implied. From the ‘Sahara of snow’ and the boarded windows of the second line, to the ‘savage servility’ of the next to last, the whole city seems locked in an aura of unresolved opposites and stifling contradictions. Chief among these is the opposition between Colonel Shaw and the narrator, neither of whom emerges as either heroic or objectively ‘right’.
1 Kavanagh, Paul, ‘The Nation Past and Present: A Study of Robert Lowell's “For the Union Dead”’, Journal of American Studies, 5 (1971), 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See Doherty, Paul C., ‘The Poet as Historian: “For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell’, Concerning Poetry, 1 (1968), 38Google Scholar. Since Doherty's interesting and useful article is in a journal not always available I summarize his main findings concerning Lowell's departure from fact: the epigraph in the poem reads relinquunt rather than relinquit as on the memorial; both Statehouse and memorial were braced up at the time Lowell wrote, but the bracing had nothing to do with the garage; the reference to the bronze Negroes breathing comes from James's address (but Doherty does not note the irony of the following sentence: ‘State after State by its laws had denied them to be human persons’); the reference to Shaw's ‘niggers’ came not from Shaw's father but from a Southern officer – the phrase became a rallying cry in the North; and the Mosler Safe Company never referred to its products as the ‘Rock of Ages’ though it did exploit the Hiroshima bomb in one of its more grotesque advertisements.
3 The speeches of the day were printed in Exercises at the Dedication of the to Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty Fourth Regiment of Massachusetle Infantry, May 31, 1897, and William James's speech was republished by his son James, Henry Jr, in his father's Memories and Studies (New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1991, rpt. 1912) pp. 37–61Google Scholar; it is from this edition I quote. It is also interesting to note that Lowell's poem was itself first read at a public performance, the Boston Arts Festival on 5 June 1960, and that it was first published under the title ‘Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th’, a fact that should condition any too ready comparison with Allen Tate's’ ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’. See Doherty, 41.
4 In a letter to Henry James dated 5 June 1897, William James wrote of the dedication:
It was very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since – the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself – ‘the tender grace of a day that is dead’ – etc. We shall never have anything like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finer things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.] Washington's speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.
(Selected Letters of William James, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), p. 168)
Mazzaro, James, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965)Google Scholar thinks that the letter may have suggested ‘the drained faces of Negro schoolchildren’ to Lowell (pp. 125–7); while this is not impossible it seems to me more likely that, if Lowell did indeed know the letter, it simply reinforced the connexion between Shaw and the present social order which most critics, however they interpret Shaw, find to be at the heart of the poem. The letter shows clearly that James did not overvalue Shaw himself, however much he patronized the black.