On an Unattributed Photograph of Lorado Taft’s Students at Work on Statuary for the Columbian Exposition.
There are seven people in the photograph:
a young man and woman in the foreground
stand at the feet of an allegorical group,
twice life-size, The Sleep of the Flowers,
maidens and children whose vertical arrangement
suggests the moments before green shoots
emerge in first spring; in the background
and above the topmost Flower, four women
and two men are distributed across a scaffold
placed against a giant bas relief of Columbia,
or Progress, or Commerce maybe,
helmeted like Minerva and facing
resolutely West, or at least left.
The composition of the photograph
is crowded, unclassical, crisscrossed
by the ladders Taft’s assistants used
to ascend the sculptures.
There are scratches on the plate
and errors in the exposure
and the illusion is created,
if it is an illusion, that in the moment
the shutter clicked, one of the sculptor’s
assistants was being pulled into the stone.
Lorado Taft Suffers a Crisis of Confidence, 1893
From his home in the ideal
Auguste Rodin sent
to the Columbian Exposition
a cast of one of the figures
in his memorial group
The Burghers of Calais:
Eustache de St. Pierre
with the rope around his neck
and anguish written
on his bronze features.
Of course Taft fled
to the Palace of Art
to see St. Pierre
the moment he was
out of the crate.
And when he had taken in
the statue’s lines and finish,
saw the bronze rendering
of bourgeois selflessness,
noted the emotional restraint
with which the Master
treated his subject,
Taft returned home,
took to his bed
and did not rise
for a week.
Lorado’s Taft’s Eternal Silence: A People’s History
In 1909, the year Taft installed
Eternal Silence at Graceland cemetery,
a young man, the son of Chicago’s
professional classes, being then groomed
for the law, took one look at
the ten-foot bronze of shrouded Death
and ran away to sea.
Silence recurred in decades
of night terrors for a woman
who passed it as a child in arms
at Graceland in the spring of 1937
and never knew in later life
where the image came from.
Criminals and addicts over the years
have either been reformed at Silence
or confirmed in their vocations,
spouses, no small number, turned
either toward or away from adultery.
In 1974 two kids smoking weed
in the lee of the statue
founded a new religion.
Eternal Silence stands a short
trot or canter from Graceland’s
two active coyote dens
and is a rallying point
in the breeding and bonding rituals
of those sly creatures,
has witnessed, as nights pass
over the North Side, a suite
of furtive coyote embraces.
For more than a century now
the neighborhood’s crows
have harassed and abused the statue,
stooping on it, fouling it with their filth,
singing to Silence their anthems of derision.
Benjamin Goluboff is the author of Ho Chi MInh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Biking Englewood: An Essay on the White Gaze, both from Urban Farmhouse Press. Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College. Some of his work can be read at https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff