"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
Robert Lowell
Life Studies, 1959
ROBERT GOULD SHAW
(THE MONUMENT BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS)
I
Fixt in one desire,
Thrilled by one fierce fire,
Marching men and horse,
And he the youthful rider -- one soul, one aim, one force.
II
Onward he doth press;
Moving, tho' motionless;
Resolute, intent,
as on some mighty errand the willing youth were bent.
III
Onward, tho' he hears
Father's sisters' tears;
Onward, tho' before him
-- Grief more near, more dear --the breaking heart that bore
him.
IV
Onward, tho' he leaves
One who lonely grieves;
O, keep him, Fate! from harm,
For on his dewy lips the bridal kiss is warm.
V
What doth he behold
Making the boy so bold?
Speak with whispering breath!
O Fate, O Fame, O radiant soul in love with glorious death!
VI
Eyes that forward peer --
Why have they no fear?
Because, through blood and blight
They see the golden morning burst and bring the living light;
VII
See War the fetters strike
From black and white alike;
See, past the pain and scorn,
A nation saved, a race redeemed, and freedom newly born;
VIII
See, in the days to come, --
When silent War's loud drum,
ere civic wrong shall cease, --
Heroes as pure and brave arise on battlefields of peace.
Richard Watson Gilder
Collected Poems (1875)
