Number 177: Edwin Arlington Robinson "The Tree in Pamela's Garden"

The Tree in Pamela's Garden

Pamela was too gentle to deceive
Her roses. "Let the men stay where they are,"
She said, "and if Apollo's avatar
Be one of them, I shall not have to grieve."
And so she made all Tilbury Town believe
She sighed a little more for the North Star
Than over men, and only in so far
As she was in a garden was like Eve.

Her neighbors—doing all that neighbors can
To make romance of reticence meanwhile—
Seeing that she had never loved a man,
Wished Pamela had a cat, or a small bird,
And only would have wondered at her smile
Could they have seen that she had overheard.

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Hap Notes: Almost everything I'm going to say about this poem is unorthodox so if you are writing a paper on this and you use my explication of it, which I think is sound, be prepared to defend it rigorously.

First off, Pamela has had an experience with love and passion which moved her so deeply she knew the company of another beloved was unnecessary and would not be as rich or as meaningful. Robinson/Pamela calls her beloved "Apollo's avatar" and I suppose this could mean that she had an affair with someone and the memory of it was enough for her life.

OR, let's think on the Apollo reference a bit more deeply because this is about a tree, remember, and there's a good story about Apollo and a tree.

One day, up where the gods hang around, Cupid was playing with Apollo's bow and arrows and Apollo gets mad at him and says something to the effect of "You stupid child! Put down my bow! Don't you know I killed a monstrous serpent with that weapon? It's not for the likes of you who only shoot silly little arrows at dumb mortals!"

Cupid is more than a bit put off by this dismissal of what he does so he teaches Apollo a lesson about the true and terrible power of love. Cupid has two arrows in his arsenal: one will repulse love at all costs ( a leaden dull arrow), one will cause burning passion (a sharply pointed golden arrow.) Cupid takes up his bow and shoots the leaden arrow at a nymph named Daphne, a wild child of the river god Peneus, who loved sports and running and being free. One wonders if she even needed the leaden arrow to oppose a suitor, many of which she had already spurned. She was a wild beauty who loved her freedom. Cupid shoots the golden arrow at Apollo who falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with her.

Daphne's dad would really like her to settle down and give him some grandchildren but she tells her dad she wants to be chaste (there's a pun here with" chased" but, nevermind) and free like Apollo's sister Artemis/Diana. She begs her dad to promise her that he will help her maintain this lifestyle, which he reluctantly does.

The smitten Apollo tries to woo her to no avail. He starts chasing Daphne with all of his unbridled ardor and manly speed. He keeps begging her to stop and even says, "Hey! Don't you know who I am? I'm no shepherd or peasant, I'm a god and a son of Jupiter." This cuts no ice with Daphne whatsoever. Just as Apollo is about to get to her, just as he touches her, Daphne calls out to her father to save her. He, with some amazingly strange sense of helping, changes her into a tree- a laurel tree. Apollo finds himself the first literal tree-hugger. (We won't make the wood joke but it 's there.)

Apollo says he will care for the tree and that her boughs will grace the heads of champions and great men hence the crowning of prizewinners with laurels.

Now let's go back to the poem which I believe can easily be interpreted to mean that Pamela had a lesbian lover. It's that phrase "never loved a man" coupled with the idea that the tree is Apollo's avatar, do you see it? It's possible. The poet could be saying that the story of Daphne, as Apollo's avatar, makes her feel like male-female love is not worth grieving over. She is only like Eve in that she lives in a garden- another possible reference to her not procreating with a man. I'm just saying all this is possible in the poem. Look at the poem's title, eh? And that roses reference has some interest in this case, maybe?

If you choose to see this as Pamela having one male lover, that's fine, too. I can see this, also. Regardless of male or female, Pamela looks to the north star, a symbol of constancy, and pledges her constant love to one who is no longer there. In this case, Pamela or her memories may be the tree she nurtures in her garden.

Pamela smiles at the townsfolk, who wish she at least had a little pet for her to love, because her deeply passionate affair has and will nourish her need for love for the rest of her life. And I think the smile might be because her lover was not a man. Just sayin'.

Let's not also forget the possibilities of Pamela having a rich imaginary life in her own thoughts, her private garden, where we have only some small semblance of what's happening there. All this may be in her head-- gazing up dreamily at the stars-- this doesn't make it any the less real to her, who is the only one who counts in it, anyway. Although that "Eve" comment suggests otherwise in that she has "tasted" "sin."

Here's where we have talked about Robinson before. You might want to refresh your memory on him because his life has a similar tone to Pamela's. In the poem- he COULD be Pamela or the "Apollo" to some Pamela:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-47-edwin-arlington-robinson.html
and here:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-109-edwin-arlington-robinson.html

Here is the famous and exquisite statue of Daphne and Apollo by Bernini, pictured today in the masthead, with a bit of helpful commentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3RSRrUL1Os

Number 176: Rabindranath Tagore "The Banyan Tree"

The Banyan Tree

O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond,
have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have
nested in your branches and left you?
Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at
the tangle of your roots that plunged underground?

The women would come to fill their jars in the pond, and your
huge black shadow would wriggle on the water like sleep struggling
to wake up.

Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles
weaving golden tapestry.

Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows, and
the child would sit still and think.
He longed to be the wind and blow through your resting
branches, to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water,
to be a bird and perch on your topmost twig, and to float like
those ducks among the weeds and shadows.

--Rabindranath Tagore

Hap Notes: The Banyan tree is the national tree of India. Do you know, by the by, what the U.S. national tree is? It's the oak- a perfectly lovely tree but I voted (yes, it was several years ago but you could vote for the national tree through the Arbor Day Foundation) for the redwood. Some of the redwoods and the sequoias in California have been around since Jesus was a boy– no kidding. The oak got 110,000 votes, the redwoods got 81,000 and then there were scattered votes for other trees like the dogwood and the maple. The oak has a variety that grows in every state so I see the wisdom of the choice which was made official in congress in 2004. Where were we? Oh, yeah, the banyan tree. Sorry...

The banyan is a good choice for India in so many ways. As you can see from the Tagore poem today they were much climbed upon and dreamed about by children (and adults.) The banyan is usually the center of a small village for trade and meetings since its branches give shade in the hot sun. The leaf of the banyan is said to be the resting place of Krishna after he consumes the universe and then creates it again (it's sorta like the big bang theory only it's 3,000 years older.) The Buddha obtained enlightenment sitting under a variety of the banyan, the Bodhi tree.

But it's more than this that makes it a perfect symbol for India. First of all, the tree grows by placing its branches down, so its reflection in the water makes it look like it's growing upwards in a kind of solid metaphor for the illusions of the world. The tree's seeds germinate in cracks and crevices of the host tree, sending branches everywhere around it, called aerial prop roots. It's somewhat like a family unit in India where the children stay with the parents, marry and bring their spouses home to have children who grow up and marry and add to the family "compound."

The largest banyan tree in India has more than 2,000 of those prop roots and is over 250 years old. Here it is – this "forest" is all one tree : www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9YUya1Xgkc&feature=related

Of course we are all one banyan tree, too, aren't we?

Tagore's images are so vivid: the "shaggy headed" tree, the reflections wriggling like sleep struggling to awaken, the weavings of sunlight on the water. He always manages to make beauty that touches the soul, doesn't he?

Here's where we have talked about Tagore before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-85-rabindranath-tagore-closed.html

and here:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/05/number-147-rabindranath-tagore.html

Number 175: Robert Frost "Provide, Provide"

Provide, Provide

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on simply being true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

-- Robert Frost

Hap Notes: Here, Frost has written one of the easiest poems to memorize in the English language. No one I know who has read it more than a few times comes away from it without a few verses stuck in the memory. Of course, Frost is obviously making a point about fame, Hollywood glamor and how industries who create it and the public, cast it aside when the star is used up, older and unusable for their purposes.

But this is Frost, remember, and he's poking at us with a bit of sly humor while he makes a devastating point. The sing-song rhythm makes the poem lighter than it really is and there's a slightly darker side to this poem beyond just the glimpse of a scrub-woman who used to be a beautiful movie star.

It's the name Abishag. What's up with that? Who could possibly be named that? We live in a culture where Puff Daddy can become P Diddy and now, Swag. Prince can become less than a name and more of an unpronounceable symbol and then become Prince again. People can take odd names like The Edge and Bono with relative impunity. The pop charts adore Lady Gaga. So why are you surprised at Abishag?

Because, you say, it's Frost and the one thing I've learned on this website is that Frost is never exactly what he seems. At least, that's what I hope you are saying. And you are right. Frost makes no casual selections.

"Now King David was old and advanced in years. And although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm." 1 Kings 1:1

King David (in the first book of Kings in the Bible) was getting old and his followers were worried about him. His circulation was bad and he was cold all the time and had to be in bed most of the day. So, they found a beautiful young woman from Shunam (or Shulam) named Abishag and she was charged with the duty to lie next to the king to warm him both from her body warmth and her beauty which was thought would increase his, uh, manly warmth. That was her job; look hot and and warm the king.

"Therefore his servants said to him, “Let a young woman be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king and be in his service. Let her lie in your arms, that my lord the king may be warm. So they sought for a beautiful young woman throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king.” 1 Kings 1:2, 1:3

King David never "knew" her, as they say in the Bible, that euphemism for sex. He already had the limit of 18 wives and he was pretty well taken care of on that score (no pun intended.) Abishag was just there to provide warmth. I believe in the Talmud it says that Abishag wanted David to marry her but he was full up with wives and he neither had sex with her nor married her.

Okay, this is pretty weird but it gets weirder. It was pretty well known that King David's cold body temperature and weakness was heading him towards death. So his wife, Bathsheba (who we'll get to in a moment) was worried because one of David's older sons, Adonijah by name, had seized the throne. David had already pretty much decided that his son with Bathsheba, Solomon, should be the next king so David and his advisers put Solomon in the office of king before David died. This was a good idea because Adonijah had seized the throne and was feasting as David was lying around cold and weak. Abishag would have heard all the meetings going on between David and Bathsheba and his advisers who encouraged him to crown Solomon early.

Adonijah finds out that David made his brother king and the guests at his feast get up and run away. Solomon pardons Adonijah for his take over and tells him to go home and quit plotting.

After David's death, Adonijah asks Bathsheba to ask Solomon if he can marry Abishag. Solomon sees this as another sneaky plot by Adonijah to shake up the royal household and lay claim to the throne. So Adonijah is put to death.

Bathsheba, as you may recall, was the woman the young David saw bathing, desired and had her husband sent to war and killed so he could, uh...know her. He killed her husband, but he did marry her, anyway, and make her son king. She ends up pretty okay, biblically speaking.

We don't know what happens to Abishag. She just disappears from the Bible. She may have become part of Solomon's household. According to the Bible that 18 wife rule went right out the window with Solomon who supposedly had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Abishag, whatever she was, is not mentioned.

So the young and beautiful Abishag had the unenviable job of laying next to an old man as he lay dying (David was around 69 or 70.) We won't go any farther down that road except to say ewww! David, remember, was remarkably handsome in his day and he was king but still, eww! Her beauty was used, her very body warmth was used and she ends up as a wisp of a footnote in the remarkable story of King David. Jeez, Goliath gets a better deal than Abishag, sheesh!

So Frost is saying something very extreme about the way we use beauty and youth and Hollywood stardom. We literally suck the warmth right out of them. We use them as servants to our lust. We discard them. Sure, we knew that but the Abishag story is a literal shocker; young women used by old guys 5,000 years ago. Frost is implying with the name Abishag that this isn't just Hollywood- it's all through history.

David doesn't even give Abishag any affection, although it wasn't his idea to have a human bedwarmer. Who thought of that? I'm glad we don't know his name. Creep.

So, Frost cautions, if you get to the top- make provisions. It has been happening to women for thousands of years. Doesn't look like it's gonna stop anytime soon.

Just a little sly Frost-y twist to consider. The great poetry of the Bible, the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon as it's often called, is considered by some scholars to be written about Abishag "the Shulamite" – the woman in the poem. Abishag may have inspired some poetry, eh?

Here's where we've talked about Frost before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-7-robert-frost-design_14.html

Frost is also poems 69, 90 and 128. The masthead today is the painting "David and Abishag" by Pedro Americo.

Number 174: Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Two Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes"

Two Scavengers In A Truck,
Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes

At the stoplight waiting for the light
Nine A.M. downtown San Francisco
a bright garbage truck
with two garbage men in red plastic blazers
standing on the back stoop
one on each side hanging on
and looking down into
an elegant open Mercedes
with an elegant couple in it
The man
In a hip three-piece linen suit
With shoulder-length blond hair & sunglasses
The young blond woman so casually coifed
with a short skirt and colored stocking
On his way to his architect's office
And the two scavengers up since Four A.M.
Grungy from their route
On the way home
The older of the two with grey iron hair
And hunched back
Looking like some
Gargoyle Quasimodo
And the younger of the two
Also with sunglasses and long hair
About the same age as the Mercedes driver
And both scavengers gazing down
As from a great distance
At the cool couple
As if they were watching some odorless TV ad
In which everything is possible

And the very red light for an instant
Holding all four close together
As if anything at all were possible
Between them
Across that great gulf
In the high seas
Of this democracy

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Hap Notes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919) carries a large part of the responsibility for the massively heavy load that is contemporary literature, most especially poetry. It's hard to imagine what poetry and literature would have been like without Ferlinghetti's City Lights, both as a touchstone bookstore and as a publisher of seminal 20th century poetry and a magazine. You may not like the "Beats" as poets but if you like anyone that came after them, you owe Ferlinghetti a bit of thanks because the Beat generation soaked into this country so deeply that all literature was affected by its presence. Things were written with them, for them, against them and as a reaction to them and it still reverberates in literature today.

Unlike Ginsburg, Keroac, Corso et.al. Ferlinghetti has the muscle to carry this load. Highly educated and supremely well-read, he had already experienced many things that the Beats could only imagine. His life has been one of constant, patient, tolerant, often enthusiastic searching and this wisdom, to know that life is a search without end where all possibilities must be explored, is why he is such an excellent choice for the center that is the maelstrom of current literature. That perspective keeps him just a bit above the fray.

Ferlinghetti's dad died before he was born, his mother was committed to an asylum and he lived his young life in the company of his aunt, and by extension, the very rich whose children she was employed to watch as a governess. He spent some time in orphanages waiting for his aunt to find work. His aunt, Emily, was French and he spent the first five years of his life in France, with French his first language. He went to a fancy highly regarded private school and is an Eagle Scout (I say "is" because that's for life, you know). His B.A. in journalism was taken at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he was writing short stories then, mostly. He went Midshipman's school in Chicago after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and shipped out as a junior officer. He was in the invasion at Normandy (he was part of the sub chaser screen) and after VE Day he transferred to the Pacific theater. This next thing is mighty important: six weeks after the bombing of Nagasaki, he saw the ruins of the city.

After the war he got his M.A. at Columbia in English Literature and later got his doctorate at the Sorbonne. All this stuff happened to him before the Beats. Ferlinghetti was growing into a man who was shocked into pacifism by the horror he saw in the war and believed that poetry and literature had to come down from its ivory tower and mix with the people.

Ferlinghetti and the Beats is far too large a subject to cover here but I wanted to give you some of the bone structure of Ferlinghetti to see how poetry could flourish under his generous leadership. City Lights published many of the Beats, went on trial for obscenity with Ginsburg's "Howl" and was the champion of free speech for many a poet and writer, all under Ferlinghetti's leadership. He published, in City Lights magazine, the Hungryalists of India, whose willfully obscene poetry would blanch the crudest rapper, in the interests of free speech and the freedom of the artist. Even Robert Lowell, when he went to City Lights for a reading, was moved to become a bit more spontaneous and less rigid.

City Lights published a who's who of luminaries including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Charles Bukowski, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsburg, Neal Cassady, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso, Robert Duncan, William S. Burroughs and Gary Snyder, just to name a few. Ferlinghetti, as you can see, was not exclusively the publisher of only Beat poetry.

Now, I'll be frank with you. I am not a great fan of most Beat poetry with the exceptions of Ferlinghetti (who really was NOT a Beat per se) and Corso and Rexroth, but I will defend to the death their right to write how and what they wanted. I don't want to be too snooty about it, though, because there are many Beat poems I love, it's just not my favorite style of poetry.

In today's poem, I wonder who the scavengers really are, especially in the times we live in where the rich are unabashedly unafraid to show their avaricious indifference to those who keep the country going.

I will never forget, nerves thrumming with anticipation and excitement, the first copy I bought of Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind with its courier print, like a feverishly typewritten missive to the few who would read it (it has gone on to sell over a million copies so it's not THAT few anymore and by the time I bought it, the book had been in print for more than 10 years) and its revolutionary frankness. I was in a basement bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota and I was 15 or 16 and my heart pounded as I bought the thing and I tingled with sparks all over as I read it on the long bus ride home. That copy fell apart about 10 years ago and I still miss it.

Ferlinghetti still lives, his artwork (oh, yeah, forgot to mention that, sorry. The masthead today is his painting, "Conquer") still has shows and a dealer and he still speaks on poetry and writes. The world is a better place while he's around.

Oh, by the by, City Lights was named after the Charlie Chaplin film- the Chaplin estate gave them permission to use it when the store was started in 1953.

Here's a good Ferlinghetti quote:
"Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do."

and another

"Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back."

and another

"And one day ashore, we took a train over to Nagasaki. It was just a few hours away. And I think it must have been about seven weeks after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. And there had been time to "clean things up," quote/unquote, for some time, but still it was a devastating scene. It made me an instant pacifist. There was just three square miles of mulch with human hair and bones sticking out, and on the horizon a sort of—a landscape you’d find in the painting of Anselm Kiefer these days: blackened unrecognizable shapes sticking up on the horizon and teacups full of flesh, teacups—"

One more: "Well, we didn’t use the word "beat" out on the back of any City Lights publication, including Allen Ginsberg’s books. I wasn’t a member of the original Beat Generation. I was—when they were in Columbia College, I was in graduate school at Columbia. I didn’t know any of them. And it was only after I came to San Francisco that I started meeting the poets, because a bookstore is a natural place for poets to congregate. And right from the beginning we tried to make City Lights a community center, which it soon became."

You can find more Ferlinghetti here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lawrence-ferlinghetti

And here's City Lights, still going strong: www.citylights.com/

Here's a great interview with Ferlinghetti: www.democracynow.org/2007/12/24/legendary_beat_generation_bookseller_and_poet

Number 173: Katherine Mansfield "Butterfly Laughter"

Butterfly Laughter

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the
butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: "Do not eat the poor
butterfly."
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother's lap.

-- Katherine Mansfield

Hap Notes: This charming little poem seemed like a fun thing to read in the middle of a work week, especially with the coming summer vacations that, when I was young, always entailed a visit to grandma's house.

I had a little bowl with a bear at the bottom and I think most kids have some sort of bowl similar to that when they are very young. My grandmother used to say, "You'd better rescue the bear!" I remember wishing the bear would just eat some of the darn oatmeal. My brothers always had super-hero bowls. My sister had Strawberry Shortcake on hers.

Porridge is sort of what Americans call oatmeal except it can be made from a variety of grains of which oats are only one. In fact, thin porridge (so thin you could drink it) is gruel, something I always wondered about in those Dickens books about the workhouse where children and adults are given it for a meal. Cream of Wheat is (obviously) a wheat porridge and so is Wheatena. In fact, polenta (which is, if you ask me, Italian grits) is considered a corn meal porridge and rice pudding is considered a variable of rice porridge.

Remember the little rhyme?:

Pease Porridge hot
Pease Porridge cold
Pease Porridge in the pot
Nine days old.

Some like it hot
Some like it cold
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old.

Yes? No? Maybe? Well, it's porridge made from dried peas. Porridge can be made with quinoa or rye or flax or millet or any number of dried grains. Every culture has a variety of the stuff. Velvet porridge is a norse creation which is basically flour and butter mixed with milk (like a thin gravy.) Delicious fried cornmeal mush, is just thick corn porridge (grits) sliced and fried.

Now, I love all these things but when I was a kid, oatmeal, the American version of porridge, was a horrid thing even with the seductive additions of brown sugar or cinnamon or walnuts or pecans or maple syrup. Most kids are sort of like that, hence the "bottom of the bowl" pictures to lure the eater to finish the contents.

Don't you love the idea of a butterfly's teeny laugh? I'll betcha butterflies would have perched on my grandma, too. It's interesting how she says "the" grandmother, isn't it? I'm not sure if that's a common English thing or not.

Isn't it wonderful how some poetry can make you think and feel deeply and some can make you just smile happily?

Here's where we've talked about Mansfield before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-116.html

Number 172: Naomi Shihab Nye "Kindness"

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

Hap Notes: I just have a few comments to add to this wonderful poem. If we were not born to be happy then why do babies laugh? What's the point? When you are a child looking up at the sky and see a bird flying in the sky, the first time that you think; "I wonder what that feels like – to fly?"; you are actually planting the first seeds of empathy. How does it feel to be another?

Nye tells us that loss shows us something real and profound about existence; it ain't always easy. And sometimes it seems completely hopeless. How do we recover from losses? Some of the healing is the distance of time. Some of it may come from the kindness of others. When we understand that the tragedy of another is close to our own lives a variety of emotions can grow but one of them can be a vexing guilty willful indifference.

You know that feeling you get, when something bad happens to somebody else, that makes you say things like, "Well, they shouldn't have built a house by the river – it was sure to get flooded!" or "If you do something stupid like that you are bound to get hurt." As you say it, there's a little wing that beats in your chest or a little shadow on your shoulder that makes you feel a little crappy about saying such a thing. You may brush it off and say it louder, with more conviction to scare off that feeling but it's too late. Kindness is always tapping you on the shoulder. You are free to ignore it, but it will come back over and over again until you let it in. Often it takes some tragedy or trouble in your own life to see that.

I love the idea in the poem that kindness is what you have been looking for and has been looking for you. Kindness is a friend or companion that will follow you around the rest of your life.

In the end, the only person you really have to live with your whole life is you. You can choose to see misery and be resentful about the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" or you can feel a kindness towards others and wish for their well being. You'll feel better, richer and more connected to the earth if you feel kindly, even in the face of your own sadness.

The Buddhists say that one should treat each creature as if he/she was your own child. I wonder what the world would be like if kindness was the goal of each person? Do you imagine wars or poverty or crime or heartache would stem from this? What is the value of human life? What are we trying to achieve and why?

What is the cloth the poet is speaking about? What is the fabric of life, the tapestry of civilization, the flying carpet of existence, made from?

Here's where we have talked about Nye before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-36-naomi-shihab-nye-traveling.html

The masthead is an inset of a photograph of Lubomir Bukov "Shadows of the Past." Isn't it delightful?

Number 171: Robert Lowell "For the Union Dead"

For the Union Dead

"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 crowded, 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 of 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 statutes 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 statutes 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 blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell


Hap Notes: Since memorial day was originally observed to commemorate the more than 600,000 Americans lost in the Civil War, this would seem like an appropriate poem for the day.

Let me set the scene a bit for you since this was written in the 60s, and while the poem has a lot of extraordinary things to tell us about our own era, it was written when specific things were happening then.

Lowell has a few historical inaccuracies in the poem but none of them are glaring omissions and serve the ends of the poem, as you will see. Lowell is looking at the Capitol Area of Boston where the old aquarium used to be (there in the poem but closed down and defunct) and a statue of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment has been displaced and the Capitol building has been braced for the building of a parking garage under the Capitol building. All the literal earth quaking in the poem is from the construction "dinosaurs" unearthing and the various other sounds of massive construction. The poet sees an ad for Mosler safes (a safe that really did make it through the bombing in Hiroshima) as the only reminder of WWII.

Now the statue of Colonel Shaw is by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and depicts him riding with his all black troops. The regiment got badly beaten at Fort Wagner in South Carolina and the confederates bury the Colonel in a ditch with his black troops as an insult. Shaw had previously stated that he wished to be buried with his brave men if the time ever came and his relatives were glad that he got to be buried with them (he had the right, as an officer, to have his body taken home for a burial.) The film "Glory" is based on this, by the way. (Helen Vendler also points out that Shaw's sister was married to one of Lowell's relatives. The letters he quotes were in the family's archives.) William James gave a speech at the statue's dedication on this day (Memorial Day, but it was May 31, like usual for the day,) in 1897. The Latin epigraph of the poem is a slightly altered version of the one on the statue. Lowell has it read "They relinquished everything to serve the republic", the original says "he" not "they."

It's also worth pointing out that the poem is written at a turbulent time for civil rights. Although, perhaps with the onslaught of the not-so-subtle racism of the Obama "birthers" it's obvious that we are still far from the goal.

Okay, so let's cut to the chase, what is Lowell saying here? Well, there's a lot and some I think you will uncover by yourself but he's more than hinting that contemporary values are base, commercial and care little for the past. He's dreamily angry, the way Lowell often is, thinking about the statue, the value of moral honor and courage and the brusque way we are sinking into the ooze of ignorant idiot commercialized capitalism- using the hymn "Rock of Ages" as an ad catch phrase. The monument sticks like a fishbone in the throat of this modern city. The Colonel in the statue is "lean as a compass needle", a moral compass I think Lowell believes we have misplaced.

There's very little air in this poem. It's claustrophobic with cars, bubbles that need to pop and breathe, the tension of black school children during de-segregation. Even the safe is closed and safe and airless.

The fish are out of the tank now and the cars have taken their place. That dark downward vegetating kingdom is us and we slide through with "savage servility." Even the cars live in the "underworld."

The poetic license he takes is with the safe company who had no specific ad like that (although advertising is full of examples of this kind of ignorance.) The parking garage building at the capitol also included a bit of restoration. Shaw's father never made that "niggers" statement although it was much used during the Civil War on both sides for good and ill.

There is much, much more in this poem, but I think this will get your started.

I would give ten full years of my life to write a poem this good.

Here's where we've talked about Lowell before:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-33-robert-lowell-dolphin.html