St. Gaudens' & a New British Heir

Greetings!

Yesterday (Sunday) my Dad and I enjoyed a Peruvian concert at the former home of Augustus St. Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire. We've been for a few of the Sunday concerts before, and I loveee the setting and experience there in the summer. Many of St. Gaudens reliefs and pieces of sculpted bronze are displayed throughout the extensive gardens and I was most looking forward to his relief portraying Massachusetts' 54th regiment, the replica of which stands across from the old Massachusetts Statehouse.

 

St. Gaudens' home.

I found it so powerful to be reading Robert Lowell's poem, 'For the Union Dead' while there. I focused on Lowell's poem in my final American Poetry Exam but quickly (and perhaps naturally) forgot it after I left the exam hall for the promise of summer freedom on May 16. Thankfully, I revisted the poem and the words once again made a glorious impact: 'Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored... girders Braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.' -- Robert Lowell

The replica of the relief Lowell is speaking about is above.

 

Lastly, like many, I found today's birth of the next British royal to be very exciting! I began to think though, and not to turn this in a negative direction -- because this should be centered around the birth of a person entering into this world -- but the lack of bodily privacy of one who is deemed 'royal' has become increasingly non-existent and very sadening.

 

This passage from Hilary Mantel's essay Royal Bodies perhaps accurately portrays my view:

 

'I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.'