For The Union Dead Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BACD EFG HIJA KLEM NOPQ RSTU OAOV OAOW XXYX XDZA2 XB2XC2 YD2XX AE2O YF2G2L XYAX RWXU B2GAXlt i gt Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam lt i gt | A |
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The old South Boston Aquarium stands | B |
in a Sahara of snow now Its broken windows are boarded | A |
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales | C |
The airy tanks are dry | D |
- | |
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass | E |
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles | F |
drifting from the noses of the cowed compliant fish | G |
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My hand draws back I often sign still | H |
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom | I |
of the fish and reptile One morning last March | J |
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized | A |
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fence on the Boston Common Behind their cage | K |
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting | L |
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass | E |
to gouge their underworld garage | M |
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Parking spaces luxuriate like civic | N |
sandpiles in the heart of Boston | O |
a girdle of orange Puritan pumpkin colored girders | P |
braces the tingling Statehouse | Q |
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shaking over the excavations as it faces Colonel Shaw | R |
and his bell cheeked Negro infantry | S |
on St Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief | T |
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake | U |
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Two months after marching through Boston | O |
half of the regiment was dead | A |
at the dedication | O |
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe | V |
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Their monument sticks like a fishbone | O |
in the city's throat | A |
Its Colonel is as lean | O |
as a compass needle | W |
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He has an angry wrenlike vigilance | X |
a greyhound's gentle tautness | X |
he seems to wince at pleasure | Y |
and suffocate for privacy | X |
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He is out of bounds now He rejoices in man's lovely | X |
peculiar power to choose life and die | D |
when he leads his black soldiers to death | Z |
he cannot bend his back | A2 |
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On a thousand small town New England greens | X |
the old white churches hold their air | B2 |
of sparse sincere rebellion frayed flags | X |
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic | C2 |
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The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier | Y |
grow slimmer and younger each year | D2 |
wasp waisted they doze over muskets | X |
and muse through their sideburns | X |
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Shaw's father wanted no monument | A |
except the ditch | E2 |
where his son's body was thrown | O |
and lost with his 'niggers ' | - |
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The ditch is nearer | Y |
There are no statutes for the last war here | F2 |
on Boylston Street a commercial photograph | G2 |
shows Hiroshima boiling | L |
- | |
over a Mosler Safe the 'Rock of Ages' | X |
that survived the blast Space is nearer | Y |
when I crouch to my television set | A |
the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons | X |
- | |
Colonel Shaw | R |
is riding on his bubble | W |
he waits | X |
for the blessed break | U |
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The Aquarium is gone Everywhere | B2 |
giant finned cars nose forward like fish | G |
a savage servility | A |
slides by on grease | X |
Robert Lowell
(1)
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