Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

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.

  Lowell, although he was reluctant to describe any poem as his “best,” nonetheless had chosen “For the Union Dead” to include in a collection of poems selected by poets as their best work. He read “For the Union Dead” for the first time in June 1960 before a crowd of thousands gathered in Boston Public Garden. The poem, he said, was about “childhood memories, the evisceration of our modern cities, civil rights, nuclear warfare and more particularly Colonel Robert Shaw and his Negro regiment, the Massachusetts 54th.” He added that he had brought early personal memories into the poem because he wanted to “avoid the fixed, brazen tone of the set-piece and official ode.” The poem, Lowell said later, “may be about a child maturing into courage and terror.”

  “For the Union Dead” pulls together many strands of Lowell’s thinking and experience; it combines his public voice and political conscience with autobiography. Bound in history, it is first and foremost an American poem. It stares into the American character, as the eagle gazes into the sun. It is about a nation born in courage and descending into slack and rust; it is about valor and the corruption of valor. It asks, Which noble acts, which right things done, enter and stay in memory? What remains? What can be preserved? When art memorializes acts of courage and high deeds, can it stand against indifference? Is decay—moral, civic, a “savage servility”—inevitable?

  “We’re decaying…,” Lowell said in 1964. “We’re in some great midstream of morality; the old morality doesn’t hold, no new one has been born. Genocide has stunned us; we have a curious dread it will be repeated.”

  Randall Jarrell believed that Lowell’s personal experience of dread and terror allowed him to face the horror of twentieth-century wars, racial injustice, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. “Perhaps because his own existence seems to him in some senses as terrible as the public world—his private world hangs over him as the public world hangs over others—he does not forsake the headlined world for the refuge of one’s private joys and decencies. He sees all these as the lost paradise of the childish past, the past that knew so much but still didn’t know.” The eyes see, the hand draws back.

  Decay was not new. It had been in America’s soul since her founding, at times dormant, at times deadly. William Bradford had written about moral decay only a few years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. God had given them danger, he said, then deliverance. Complacency had set in. The cycles of early New England life had followed a relentless course: peril, then safe harbor; uprooting storms, droughts, then once again “fair, sunshining days.” Suffering and renewal; madness and healing; death and resurrection: only flux did not change. It was the rhythm of the natural world; it was the rhythm of mood and madness, of imagination; it was the rhythm of the national character.

  Lowell saw his ancestors as a part of both the corruption and courage in American history. In an early poem, “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” he decried the brutality of his Puritan ancestors, including Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth Colony during King Philip’s War (1675–76). Winslow and his men had massacred so many of the Narragansett tribe that they bore a damning responsibility for its ultimate destruction. Their extermination, Lowell said, “was as crisp, bracing, and colorful as pheasant shooting.” He described the graveyard of the early Winslows, King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston, as a “great garden rotten to its roots”:

  I ponder on the railing at this park:

  Who was the man who sowed the dragon’s teeth,

  That fabulous or fancied patriarch

  Who sowed so ill for his descent, beneath

  King’s Chapel in this underworld and dark?

  Lowell took his poem’s epigraph from “The Gray Champion,” a short story by Hawthorne. “Here, also, are the veterans of King Philip’s War,” Hawthorne had written, “who burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer.” Hawthorne depicted the degeneration of the Puritan character, once steely with discipline and belief, into a “sluggish despondency,” willing to submit to the tyranny of the English king. Only by drawing upon the first spirit, the original character of New England, he said, could Americans prevail in corrupt or perilous times: “His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril….His shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New-England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry.” In times of danger in America, Hawthorne wrote, the spirit of New England had prevailed, “on the green, beside the meeting-house, at Lexington.” It had been with the colonists at Bunker Hill. It had stayed for a while as the nation broke from the British and created itself; then it ebbed out.

  There would be times of valor, times of fire in the American imagination, but there would be longer periods of moral stagnation. If the country’s fortune held, an infusion of courage would return often enough to save the depleted state. Plymouth had been exemplar, then it was not. The American Revolution had bred extraordinary thinkers and leaders and the colonies had thrived. They had innovated; pioneers had moved westward, brought life up from the prairies. The country had been again, for a while, John Winthrop’s city on the hill. Then rot set in and spread. It was in the nature of things. Fullness of growth pushed life into a false security, drove it into decay and death.

  No rot could compare in degree or kind to slavery, the original sin of America. It was the unsurvivable evil for which the nation would be held accountable in ruthless measure. America’s civil war would continue, as Lincoln proclaimed, “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Not a little of this blood, drawn with the sword, was given by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his black regiment as they attacked the Confederate battery at Fort Wagner; it is at the heart of “For the Union Dead.”

  Lowell’s great-great grandfather, the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of Boston’s West Church from 1806 to 1861, was one of New England’s earliest and most influential abolitionists. When he was a young man studying in Europe he had sought out the company of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce. They had become friends and correspondents; Wilberforce’s portrait hung prominently in the Lowell house in Cambridge. Charles Lowell preached often and persuasively against slavery; his sermons were important in creating the climate in Boston that, among other things, led to the establishment of the first black regiment in the North. The day of redemption will come, John Quincy Adams had declared in 1843. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

  In July 1862, despite widespread skepticism and resistance, especially in the South, the Congress of the United States authorized President Lincoln to raise and arm black troop
s to fight for the Union. The first regiment to be called up in the North was the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, led by a young white officer, Robert Gould Shaw. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, orator, and writer, made the impassioned case for the formation of the black regiment. “The arm of the slave was the best defense against the arm of the slaveholder,” he said in a recruitment speech in March 1863. “Liberty won by white men would lack half its luster.” Massachusetts was the right place to form the regiment: “She was first in the war of Independence; first to break the chains of her slaves; first to make the black man equal before the law; first to admit colored children to her common schools.” The white officers, Douglass promised—a promise mainly kept—“will be quick to accord to you all the honor you shall merit by your valor—and see that your rights and feelings are respected by other soldiers….The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open.”

  “One Gallant Rush” was the original title for a draft of “For the Union Dead.” Slavery for Lowell was a subject of profound consequence. America, he believed, had had the “most repressive slavery in history”; the injustice of it was “of the greatest urgency to me as a man and as a writer.” The commander of the regiment, Robert Gould Shaw, was related by marriage to the Lowell family. The Shaws, like the Lowells, were a prominent Boston family with strong abolitionist roots. In May 1863 Shaw and his regiment of a thousand men, including two sons of Frederick Douglass and a brother of William and Henry James, marched through one of the largest crowds ever to gather in Boston.

  “The more I think of the passage of the Fifty-Fourth through Boston,” wrote Robert Gould Shaw to his bride of a few weeks, “the more wonderful it seems to me….Truly, I ought to be thankful for all my happiness, and my success in life so far; and if the raising of coloured troops prove such a benefit to the country, and to the blacks, as many people think it will, I shall thank God a thousand times that I was led to take my share in it.”

  “Two months after marching through Boston, / half the regiment was dead,” Lowell writes in “For the Union Dead.” Shaw, “as lean / as a compass-needle,” had “an angry wrenlike vigilance, / a greyhound’s gentle tautness.” He seemed “to wince at pleasure, / and suffocate for privacy.” Colonel Shaw—young, reserved, privileged, principled—was, like his men, pervasively conscious of likely death. As Scott would say of those who accompanied him on his Antarctic expedition, they took risks and they knew they took them. There was no bending of will. Robert Gould Shaw would stay in his country’s imagination because he gave up privilege and comfort to die young for what he believed. He “rejoices in man’s lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die.”

  James Henry Gooding, a private in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, described the resolve of his commanding officer. “Col. Shaw, from the beginning, never evinced any fear of what others thought or said. He believed the work would be done, and he put his hands, his head, and heart to the task.” He was not intimate with his men. “He was cold, distant, and even austere….If there was any abolition fanaticism in him, he had a mind well balanced, so that no man in the regiment would ever presume to take advantage of that feeling in their favor.”

  The day of the assault on Fort Wagner, Shaw’s “manner was more unbending than I had ever noticed before in the presence of his men,” Gooding recounted. “He told them how the eyes of thousands would look upon the night’s work they were about to enter on.” He walked along the line of his troops encouraging them on, fully aware that he and most of them might die. “We could see that he was a man who had counted the cost of the undertaking before him, for his words were spoken so ominously, his lips were compressed, and now and again there was visible a slight twitching of the corners of his mouth, like one but bent on accomplishing or dying.”

  The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry led the assault against Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor near Fort Sumter, where, two years earlier, the first shots of the Civil War had been fired. Clara Barton, a Union nurse who later would found the American Red Cross, watched Colonel Shaw and his black regiment march along the sea’s edge as the Confederate army bombarded them with cannon and gunfire. “A long line of phosphorescent light streamed and shot along the waves ever surging on our right. A little to the left mark[ed] that long, dark line, moving steadily on—pace by pace—across that broad space of glistening sand.” The assault began on the evening of July 18, 1863; it ended in the early dawn of the next day.

  With Shaw at the front of his troops, sword raised, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts charged Fort Wagner. Shaw was killed at the top of the ramparts; two-thirds of his officers and nearly half of his men were killed, missing, or wounded. A Confederate soldier told the horror of what he saw the morning after the battle. “The dead and wounded were piled up in a ditch together sometimes fifteen in a heap, and they were strewn all over the plain for a distance of three-fourths of a mile.” It was a massacre. The young Southern soldier added an unusual tribute to what he had witnessed. “The negroes,” he said, “fought gallantly, and were headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived.” When Clara Barton returned to the field of battle she described it as a charnel house. “The thousand little sand-hills that glitter in the pale moonlight are a thousand headstones, and the restless ocean waves that roll and break upon the whitened beach sing an eternal requiem to the toil-worn, gallant dead who sleep beside.”

  The Confederate troops stripped Shaw’s body and threw it into a ditch with his black soldiers. They thought by doing this to insult Shaw and his regiment; Shaw’s father believed otherwise. He declined the offer to have his son’s body returned to Boston for burial and insisted instead that he remain buried in the ditch with his soldiers. “We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies,” his father wrote to the regimental surgeon. He could not “wish for him better company.—What a body-guard he has!”

  In May 1897 a memorial to commemorate Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was dedicated on Boston Common. Sixty-five veterans of the attack on Fort Wagner marched past the monument, just a few yards from where the regiment had received its colors thirty-four years earlier; they stopped to place a wreath of lilies of the valley to honor their dead. William James, whose brother had served under Shaw at Fort Wagner, gave the oration. “There on horseback,” he said, referring to the newly unveiled memorial by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled.” Why, James asked, were Shaw and his men deserving of a great monument? Why had art been put to the service of commemorating war? The failed action at Fort Wagner did not warrant it. The successful war to save the Union did. Even more than the constitutional questions that the war had resolved, it had “freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States.” It had freed the country, slave and owner alike. It had preserved the nation.

  The Shaw Memorial would stand in memory to something more than “common and gregarious” military courage, William James told those gathered. The poet and orator were needed to keep alive that “lonely kind of valor (civic courage as we call it in peace times).” The kind of courage “to which monuments of nations should most of all be reared,” he continued, is not military valor. Of the “five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse.” It was the day by day civic courage of those who act reasonably, who act swiftly against corruption, resist rabid partisanship. “The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is the lesson that evils must be checked in time, before they grow so great. The Almighty cannot love such long-postponed accounts, or such tremendous settlements. And surely He hates all settlements that do such quantities of incidental devils’ work.”

  Booker T. Washington, the voice of freed slaves in America, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, spoke after Wil
liam James had finished. “Watchman, tell us of the night, what the signs of promise are,” he said, echoing the refrain used by slaves in anticipation of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. “If through me, a humble representative, nearly ten millions of my people might be permitted to send a message to Massachusetts, to the survivors of the 54th Regiment, to the committee whose untiring energy has made this memorial possible, to the family who gave their only boy that we may have life more abundantly, that message would be: Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain, that up from the depths of ignorance and poverty we are coming, and if we come through oppression, out of the struggle we are gaining strength; by way of the school, the well-cultivated field, the skilled hand, the Christian home, we are coming up; that we propose to invite all who will step up and occupy this position with us.”

  The Civil War—its slaughter, treason, courage, tragedy—somehow had called from America her best: the complex brilliance of Abraham Lincoln, the rhetoric of Frederick Douglass, the poetry of Walt Whitman, the civic leadership of Booker T. Washington and Clara Barton. The valor of Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment called out a different kind of genius from the nation’s writers and artists. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor of the Shaw Memorial, was one of them. “You have immortalized my native city,” said Shaw’s mother to Saint-Gaudens at the dedication. “You have immortalized my dear son, you have immortalized yourself.” The poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Berryman, and scores of other artists created anew in response to the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment and to the memorial raised in its honor: a monument to stand for courage and values lost or dying, a monument to “stick like a fishbone in the city’s throat.” In words, bas relief, or music: artists responded. Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” remains a deeply and particularly American work of art.