Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 8

Remembering
Dear Ones:
Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode”
By Carol Bundy
On July 21, 1865, Harvard College gathe re d to
honor its Civil War dead. James Russell Lowell, asked to
write a poem for the occasion, read out his now-famous
Commemoration Ode. The oration did not go well: the draft
from which he read was flawed and further suffered from
Lowell’s mumbling recitation. Many believed that Lowell
had failed to get beyond his personal grief: his three
nephews had volunteered as officers in the Union Army
and had all been killed. Critics have pointed, for example,
to the awkwardness in verse VIII, which begins “we sit here
in the Promised Land/That flows with Freedom’s honey
and milk;/But ‘twas they won it, sword in hand./Making
the nettle danger soft for us as silk.”
There was irony inherent in the commission. As a poet,
Lowell had made his name with The Biglow Papers (1848), a
long anti-war poem that gave voice to the unpopularity of
the Mexican War among New Englanders and helped to
cohere opposition to the extension of Slave Power as the
nation careened toward civil war. Lowell’s generation of
Transcendentalists had tried to shake things up, searching
for meaningful lives and opposing slavery, and Lowell
himself had edited The Anti-Slavery Standard before the war.
Abolitionism had seemed at the time like strident protest,
but it appeared less so now that their children had fought
and died for the cause. James Russell Lowell spoke for all
those who had lost loved ones in the recent conflict as they
looked out on Harvard Yard: “In these brave ranks I only
see the gaps,/ Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf
wraps.”
Of Lowell’s three young nephews, the first to die was
William Lowell Putnam, son of Mary Lowell and Samuel
Putnam. A Lieutenant in the Massachusetts 20th, dubbed the
Harvard Regiment, Putnam was wounded in the stomach
at Ball’s Bluff, a fiasco of an unintended skirmish that
became a baptism of fire. He died after prolonged agony,
and his body was shipped home in a pine box, which his
mother went personally to collect at the rail yards. When
the coffin was opened and she saw her son’s body, still in
uniform, his sweat-stained curls, and crudely cleaned face,
“a strange peace stole into her heart & the words came
‘Peace I leave unto you—my peace I give unto you’”—
Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper. Among
abolitionist Boston, William Lowell Putnam was hailed as a
martyr. His impeccable breeding, physical beauty, and fervent
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