A Discussion of Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead"

By Julian Scutts, Student

A study in a poet's ability to interconnect planes of significance

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

A Discussion of Robert Lowell's Poem "For the Union Dead" (1960)
The Text of the Poem to be Discussed:

FOR THE UNION DEAD

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

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.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and Muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessčd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

In Robert Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" the urban landscape of Boston and two
physical features belonging to it, the old South Boston Aquarium and a monument
commemorating the valiant action of Colonel Shaw and his "Negro regiment" in the
Civil War, form a triad of distinct, albeit closely interconnected, fields of metaphorica
l reference and association. Together they afford the poem a densely compacted
matrix in which individual signifiers - single words and references to objects rather
than conventional images and metaphors serve to mutually enhance each other's
implicit symbolism and range of association. In its overall effect the poem poses a
radical critique of modern urban civilization as epitomized by Boston seen through
the eyes of the first-person narrator in Lowell's poem. However, the aspect of the
poem which impresses me most does not reside in its brilliant invective against the
so-called progress of modern industrial society but rather in its demonstration of the
poet's superb control of language and skill in the subtle uses of Irony.

The three domains represented by (a) Boston treated as a scene of bustling activity
typical of the present age, (b) the monument commemorating the Union dead and
(c) the South Boston Aquarium represent three different temporal planes, which are,
in their respective order: The present or modern age, the historical past and the vast
time-scale of nature, subject to only very gradual change. Each domain possesses
its own distinctive quality.

The mark of modernity is frenetic activity attended by a blatant disregard for the
negative consequences of modern life. Rapacious urban development is destroying
what is left of Boston's central park.

The historical past is presented as a repository of those values on which modern
society is nominally based but which this same society has effectively abandoned,
values such as those commonly associated with valor and the spirit of self-sacrifice
in the service of the very ideals the monument is meant to recall. The monument is
the physical expression of a firm belief shared by those who erected it that the
values it commemorates are worth preserving and defending. The line in the 14th
Stanza "There are no statues for the last war here" suggests that modern society has
lost such a conviction. A tense contrast between modernity and the values of past
traditions even underlies the formal organization of the poem uniting traditional
four-line stanzas and modern free verse.

The aquarium is explicitly mentioned only in the first and last stanzas of the poem,
allowing the initial and final references to the aquarium to function like brackets
which contain the poem's entire content. This structural effect, in turn, implies that
nature and the vast expanse of time in which it exists and develops embrace all
human activity, whether on the historical time-scale or in the modern age. We must
decide whether the poem questions optimistic assumptions about human progress in
view of nature's apparent indifference to the human situation.

The aquarium and the monument stand for two domains from which modern society
has become isolated, even estranged, nature and history. And it is therefore altogether
fitting that both concrete objects evince similarities in the manner the poem
describes them. Both display a dismal picture of dereliction and alienation from
their original function and purpose. The aquarium no longer holds water and the
statue of Colonel Shaw is ignored as a relic of a by-gone age. As the statue
becomes virtually synonymous with the old Colonel himself through the poet's use
of the Pathetic Fallacy. He is "out of bounds" (stanza 10) An existential affinity
shared by the aquarium and the monument is hinted at in the lines "Their
monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat" (8).
We may ascertain further mutually reinforcing parallels between the two objects.
The aquarium is boarded up while the relic is propped up by a plank splint. Both
aquarium and monument awaken a consciousness of the past in the speaker's mind,
or more precisely, two aspects of the past. The former nostalgically recalls the
speaker's childhood memory of the aquarium in better days when it actually
contained fishes and other forms of aquatic life. The monument prompts him to
reflect on events in the historical past. As witnesses of either nature or history, both
objects are spurned by present-day Bostoners, indeed modern civilization in General. However, there we find suggestions in the poem that the aquarium and the monument, nature and history, will get their own back some day. The Colonel maintains his "wren-like vigilance" (9) and nature, paradoxically enough, demonstrates its irrepressible powers of self-assertion even in human attempts to suppress it.

The aquarium gains increasing symbolic density through accretions of meaning that
are built up as the poem develops. The prime association of the aquarium and fish
is affirmed in the first stanza by the reference to the bronze weathervane cod and is
expanded in the third by reference to "the dark downward and vegetating kingdom /
of the fish and reptile", thus extending the vista so as to comprehend cold-blooded
animal life on land and in the sea. When an extinct species of reptile is referred to in the fourth stanza by the words "yellow dinosaur steam-shovels" a significant widening of associations links prehistoric life with the artefacts of modern technology. An analogous linkage is established between the "vegetating kingdom" of the aquarium and parking spaces which "luxuriate" according to words we find in the fifth stanza. These associations resurge in the final stanza with its description of automobiles: "Everywhere, / giant finned fish nose forward like fish. As by some strange twist of fate the city which has condemned the old South Boston Aquarium to neglect and dilapidation finally succumbs to the fate of being contained by a vast and unseen aquarium formed by nature. Nature's "aquarium also appears to comprehend historical time, to judge from the image of the Colonel rising like a bubble. It transpires therefore that, far from achieving progress, the inventions produced by technology are incapable of freeing mankind from the static realm of nature. Colonel Shaw at least awaits "the
blessed break" in terms of the extended Metaphor of a bubble, though whether his
release comes with the attainment of something like Nirvana or an escape from
nature's influence remains an open question.

Besides their temporal dimension, the aquarium and the monument have a spatial
aspect. When visualized, the aquarium appears as a frame or boxlike structure with
evident similarities with other objects described in the poem., the "cage" enclosing
Boston's parkland, the Molser safe that is able to survive nuclear explosions and the
television set in front of which the speaker obsequiously "crouches". The "drained
faces of the Negro school-children" shown on the television screen (another box)
appear to "rise like balloons" (15), reminding the reader of the bubbles in the
aquarium which the speaker when a child tried to burst. The TV pictures may also
prompt one to reflect how far the post-Bellum process of emancipation has borne out
the hopes of the Abolitionists of the 1860s.The reference to Hiroshima
gives the reader occasion to reflect on the immense rift between modern warfare
along with its means of mass anonymous destruction and the Civil War with the
scope it gave to individual Heroic action.

Modern society is shown in the poem not only to face physical destruction in a
nuclear conflict but death in the more insidious form of mental atrophy and the
deadening of emotion. Death in this form seems to be intimated by the commercial
photograph making the detonation of the A-bomb at Hiroshima the proof of an
advertised product's robust construction. The words "Rock of Ages" derived from a
famous hymn underline how far modern society has become removed from its
moral and religious premises.

In contrast to the boxlike shape of the aquarium, the salient feature of the
monument is its vertical orientation. In common with the spires of the old white
churches beside New England's greens and town-squares which "quilt the
graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic" (11), the monument protrudes
skywards as though proudly and defiantly. The kinds of living creatures directly
associated with the monument do not belong to the domain of fishes and
reptiles but to airborne or fleet creatures, the wren, the greyhound and the wasp,
which convey very unreptilian associations such as those of free flight, vigilance
and speed. The emphasis on the linear aspect of the wren's and greyhound's
posture imply ideas of moral rectitude and unswerving purpose. The reference to
the needle of a compass becomes a metaphor for resolute moral direction. The
Colonel's back is unbending both in terms of a physical posture and the soldier's
faithful pursuit of moral integrity. By contrast, events which take place at ground
level and underground convey associations of baseness and gross materialism.
Here is the domain of grunting dinosaur steam-shovels and underground garages.
The ditches on a modern construction site, unlike the anonymous graves of
Colonel Shaw and his men, are not worthy of having any honor bestowed upon
them.

Back then to the question of the poem's underlying attitude. In some ways Lowell's
poem anticipates the "green" ideology of the seventies and beyond, though the
speaker does evince a commitment to the values of a by-gone century. The poem's
evocation of childhood memory might be considered in the light of poetry by
Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas. In any even it attests to the optimism that is
perhaps inherent in the very act of writing poetry itself, however dismal the subject
to which it is addressed. Adorno's prophecy that there would be no poetry after
Ausschwitz has not yet seen fulfilment. Indeed, the end of poetry would signal the
triumph of totalitarianism and of moral despair.