robert gould shaw memorial and related poems

INTRODUCTION

→ Wikipedia entry on Robert Gould Shaw
→ Wikipedia entry on Robert Gould Shaw Memorial


IMAGES

→ Set of images of the memorial from Wikipedia
→ Set of images of the memorial and explanations from Gettysburg Daily
                                                                                          POEMS
​
The following is inscribed on the memorial  (along with other inscriptions and words of dedications and inspiration on the bronze sculpture). This particular one was taken from James Russell Lowell's poem "Memoriae Positum." 
        Right in the van on the red rampart's slippery swell
        with heart that beat a charge he fell
                                         forward as fits a man
        but the high soul burns on to light men's feet
        where death for noble ends makes dying sweet

  • Discuss the final two lines with students, especially in the context of Civil War history, Civil Rights, and the concept of heroes. Has Robert Gould Shaw been a true inspiration for people? Then why do people still fight over civil rights to this day? Was his death (which some considered ignoble and base at the time, not granted a proper burial) worth it? Does Saint-Gauden's public memorial help inspire people with Shaw's legacy, "burning on to light men's feet"?  How? What specifically about the memorial, artistic traits or otherwise, is inspiring--or not?

  • Does this inscription exhibit traits of American Romanticism? What about the monument itself?

​For the Union Dead
(by Robert Lowell)
(1960)
​
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.

​
  • How does Lowell feel about the Robert Shaw memorial? How can you tell? Does he have conflicting feelings, or is he of one mind? 
  • What other details does Lowell focus on aside from Robert Shaw and the memorial? Which ones are the most striking to you? How do these details function in the poem?​ ​
  • What is Lowell's purpose in this poem?
The following is a poem written by early 20th century American experimental composer (and insurance agent) Charles Ives, which he included in his musical score to " The "St. Gaudens" In Boston Common" (the first movement / section of Ives' "Three Places in New England", written around 1914, revised in 1929). 

Moving--Marching--Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly--swaying us on with you
Towards other Freedom . . .

You images of a Divine Law
Carved in the shadow of a saddened heart--
Never light abandoned-- 
Of an age and of a nation.
​
Above and beyond that compelling mass 
Rises the drum-beat of the common heart 
In the silence of a strange and 
Sounding afterglow 
Moving--Marching--Faces of Souls!
                        ​(The Los Angeles Philharmonic program notes provide a brief description of the above piece of music)

  • Does anything you read in the above poem, or hear in the piece of music, correspond to what you see in Saint-Gauden's memorial? What matches up? What doesn't? How does our opinion of the music change as we discover how it 'fits' with the memorial (or not)? Is it important for a piece of music inspired by a piece of artwork resemble the artwork in a certain way? How can music resemble, or match up with, visual art? Aren't music and visual art two very different art forms? Maybe Ives was responding to his personal, subjective feeling of the art, of experiencing the art in Boston Commons, and not the art itself. But doesn't 'the art itself' include its context, both present and past, especially a public memorial? 
  • What captures the feeling of the memorial better: Ives' poem, or Ives' music? What captures the feeling of the history of Robert Shaw and his achievements better: a piece of visual art, a piece of music, or a poem? What does each achieve that the others cannot? 
REFERENCES

Robert Lowell poem found here:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57035/for-the-union-dead