For the Union Dead Quotes

“Then morning comes,
saying, "This was a night.”
― 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

“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

“Animals
fattened for your for your arena suffered less
than you in dying-yours the lawlessness
of something simple that has lost its law,
my namesake, and the last Caligula.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“This
is the departure strip,
the dream-road. Whoever built it
left numbers, words and arrows.
He had to leave in a hurry.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

“The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,
cold slits the same crease in the finger,
the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.”
― 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.”
― Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead