out of the blue

My first of four finals is over and done with. No more poetry. Actually, it's the class that I'm saddest to see go (besides Ethics, for which I still have to write a paper). I knew everything I needed to know, but I had a heck of a time analyzing the poem that we were given. "For the Union Dead", by Robert Lowell. We had to analyze these lines:

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.

Yeah, tell me if you've got anything. Later I may post something along the lines of what I wrote, even though its not a very thorough job. After all, it was in-class, hand-written, and at a time when all I wanted to do was to get out of there!

By the way, if you're interested, I put together a database-driven poetry page that has everything we read in that class besides the collections of poetry (The Wellspring by Sharon Olds and Human Wishes by Robert Hass). It was a combination web design and poetry-studying project, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Lots of practice for my long-term blog programming project. The code in the background is anything but pretty, but it's quite functional as long as you don't use the admin system much. I still have a few bugs to work out there.

If you do want to go through the poetry we read, I'd suggest ordering by date read. Dr. Marshall worked out a pretty good order in which to read them. Lots of good stuff in there.