Schoolchildren's faces "rise like balloons" in this poem, whose speaker is struck by an advertisement for the "rock of ages," a Mosler safe shown surviving an atomic bomb.
A collection titled for and ending with this work opens "Old Flame," a poem about Jean Stafford, and another work noting that the titular "Water" was "too cold for us" in reference to another poet. Schoolchildren's faces "rise like balloons" in this poem, whose speaker is struck by an advertisement for the "rock of ages," a Mosler safe shown surviving an atomic bomb. It describes the "angry, wrenlike vigilence" of a figure who is "thin as a compass needle" after noting the "puritan, pumpkin-colored girders" that surround the (*) statehouse. The central subject of this poem is said to stick "like a fish-bone / in the city's throat," an image that, like the "giant finned cars," extends marine imagery established by this poem's opening stanza about a snow-covered aquarium. A Saint Gaudens work in Boston inspires the speaker's musing in, for 10 points, what work titled after the subjects of the Robert Gould Shaw civil war memorial, a poem by Robert Lowell?
A collection titled for and ending with this work opens "Old Flame," a poem about Jean Stafford, and another work noting that the titular "Water" was "too cold for us" in reference to another poet.
"For the Union Dead"