For the Union Dead Quotes

“Then morning comes,
saying, "This was a night.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“That was the first growth,
the heir of all my minutes,
the victim of every ramification-
more and more it grew green, and gave too much shelter.

And now at my homecoming,
the barked elms stand up like sticks along the street.
I am a foot taller than when I left,
and cannot see the dirt at my feet.

Yet sometimes I catch my vague mind
circling with a glazed eye
for a name without a face, or a face without a name,
and at every step,
I startle them. They start up,
dog-eared, bald as baby birds.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.

Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Old wives and husbands! Look, their gravestones wait
in couples with the names and half the date--
one future and one freedom. In a flash,
I see us whiten into skeletons,
our eager, sharpened cries, a pair of stones,
cutting like shark-fins through the boundless wash.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“This is the season
when our friends may and will die daily.
Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Walking and walking in a mothy robe,
one finger pushing through the pocket-hole,
I crossed the reading room and met my soul,
hunched, spinning downward on the colored globe.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“In my room at the Hotel Continentál
a thousand miles from nowhere,
I heard
the bulky, beefy breathing of the herds.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation--

prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.

The elect, the elected... they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“I envy the conspicuous
waste of our grandparents on their grand tours--
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,
while breezing on their trust funds through the world.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“But I suppose even God was born
too late to trust the old religion--
all those settings out
that never left the ground,
beginning in wisdom, dying in doubt.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“I like to imagine it must have been simpler
in the days of Lot,
or when Greek and Roman picturebook
gods sat combing their golden beards,
each on his private hill or mountain.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Hope lives in doubt.
Faith is trying to do without

faith.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Leave him alone for a moment or two,
and you’ll see him with his head
bent down, brooding, brooding,
eyes fixed on some chip,
some stone, some common plant,
the commonest thing,
as if it were the clue.
The disturbed eyes rise,
furtive, foiled, dissatisfied
from meditation on the true
and insignificant.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Long awash,
breaking myself against the surf,
touching bottom, rushed
by the green go-light
of those nervous waters, I found
my exhaustion, the light of the world.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“At fifty, we're so fragile,
a feather...”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Bed, glasses off, and all's
ramshackle, streaky, weird
for the near-sighted, just
a foot away.
The light's
still on an instant. Here
are the blurred titles, here
the books are blue hills, browns,
greens, fields, or color.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“There must be something--
someone to praise
your triumphant diffidence,
your refusal of exertion,
the intelligence
that pulsed in the sensitive,
pale concavities of your forehead.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one ascetic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Ah the light lights the window of my young night,
and you never turn off the light,
while the books lie in the library, and go on reading.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“No longer to lie reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
while the high, mysterious squirrels
rain small green branches on our sleep!”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side--”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“I long for the black ink,
cuttlefish, April, Communists
and brothels of Florence--
everything, even the British
fairies who haunted the hills,
even the chills and fever
that came once a month
and forced me to think.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Everything's changed for the best--
how quivering and fierce we were,
there snowbound together,
simmering like wasps
in our tent of books!”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Atlantic seaboard antique shop
pewter and plunder
shone in each room.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“Things last, but sometimes for days here
only children seem fit to handle children,
and there is no utility or inspiration
in the wind smashing without direction.
The fresh paint
on the captains' houses hides softer wood.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead