280
GEOFFREY H.
HARTMAN
Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it je.ems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it .was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.
The greatest of these memory studies, and the most difficult,
is
the
title poem. Its precarious forward motion reflects the problem of
the
prophetic mind. There is a consistent "drawing back" from certain
conclusions or imaginations. I do not like everything in "For the Union
Dead"; the continuity, for example, is aggressively casual. Yet its vibrant
and vital imprisonment of apocalyptic themes is totally effective in
evoke
ing great but repressed powers--powers waiting for "the blessed break."
Chief among these is the power of both Negro and white to take
the
initiative in civil rights, though the rights struggle is in an eccentric
rather than central position. The poem centers, if at all, in several
"places" (civil rights, Boston, urbanization, the slippage of time)
and
is held together in Lowell fashion by an elliptical bi<?graphy and
an
ideal. The ideal, that of service, finds its clearest expression in Lowell's
inversion of a Christian paradox: service, leadership, is to "choose life
and die"; and dying into life is what
Lifie Studies
already taught.
The
poem ends with a further inversion of a Christian theme, with a parody
of Revelation. Servility instead of service and the omen of a monstrous
backlash flood the aquarium of memory:
The Aquarium is gon,e. Everywh,ere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease·.
This is still the poet of "The Quaker Graveyard," but quietly, con·
sciously, in the eye of the storm.
Geoffrey H. Hartman
