For the Union Dead | Plot Summary & Analysis

Summary

This poem consists of 17 stanzas of four lines each. The tone is conversational, and the poem builds as a series of seemingly unrelated memories that come together when they are taken as a completed narrative.

Epigraph

Lowell gives as the poem's epigraph (a brief quotation that suggests its theme) a slightly altered version of the motto of the Society of the Cincinnati, the nation's oldest patriotic organization. This quotation, which Lowell renders as "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam," translates as "They relinquished everything to serve the Republic." The quotation appears on the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston Common, the subject of the poem.

Stanza 1

The old South Boston Aquarium is deserted and covered with snow. It is a wreck. The windows are broken and boarded, and the fish weathervane is missing half of its scales. Inside the fish tanks hold no water.

Stanza 2

The speaker recalls his childhood visits to the Aquarium. He remembers rubbing his nose against the glass of the tanks and imagining he could pop the bubbles the fish breathed into the water.

Stanzas 3–4

He draws his hand back and sighs, thinking still of primitive scenes underwater and on land. He recalls a morning last March when he leaned into a new barbed wire and galvanized fence on the grassy park in downtown Boston called Boston Common. Behind the fence, noisy steam shovels, like yellow dinosaurs, were digging up the ground to create space for an underground garage.

Stanza 5

There are, in fact, many civic parking lots in downtown Boston. The signs that another is being built are the orange girders around the Statehouse.

Stanza 6

The Statehouse, at the edge of the Common, seems to reverberate with the commotion of construction, as does the Civil War relief plaque designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The plaque commemorates Colonel Shaw of the Union Army and the "bell-cheeked" African American infantry regiment he led during the Civil War. A big plank steadies the plaque against the vibrations of the shovels.

Stanza 7

Two months after the 54th Regiment left Boston, nearly half the men had died. When American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) dedicated the plaque, he noted the art was so true to life he could almost hear the bronze soldiers breathe.

Stanza 8

The monument is a persistent irritation, a fishbone that sticks in the throats of Boston residents. Boston's Colonel Shaw is as thin and sharp as a "compass-needle."

Stanza 9

The Colonel on the plaque looks angry and, at the same time, appears to be vigilant. His body is taut in readiness. According to the narrator, the Colonel seems to wish to avoid pleasure while hoping for privacy.

Stanza 10

The Colonel can no longer be reached. He looks as though he rejoices in the power of his choice to fight, leading his "black soldiers to death." He is unbending in his convictions.

Stanza 11

On the town greens in New England, white churches recall the American Revolution (1775–83), while frayed flags, like quilts, cover the Civil War graveyards.

Stanza 12

The statues of the Union Soldier in each small town seem less real as time passes. They are more of an abstract idea. They look younger and thinner to the speaker, as the memory of their lives and deeds dims with the passing years.

Stanza 13

Colonel Shaw's father refused a proper Boston burial for his son. He chose, instead, the ditch where his son's body was "thrown / and lost" with the men he led in battle.

Stanzas 14–15

The ditch for the underground garage is near, and there are no statues from the "last war" on the Common. Nearby on a commercial street, a photograph shows "Hiroshima boiling." The photograph is an advertisement for a Mosler safe, strong enough to survive unscathed an atomic bomb blast. The speaker's attention moves from the store window with the photograph to his TV screen, where he crouches, watching the worried faces of African American children.

Stanza 16

Colonel Shaw rides the bubble of his belief, waiting for a better world, the "blessèd break."

Stanza 17

The Aquarium is only a memory now. In the present, "giant finned cars," like big, dumb fish, crowd each other and "nose forward." Their behavior, in these fishlike schools, is at once savage and humble, pressing mindlessly past, nudging others out of the way.

Analysis

The poem is best analyzed stanza by stanza—in the same way the poet builds the contrasts that propel his themes.

Epigraph

The translation of the epigraph on Saint-Gaudens's bronze relief honors Colonel Shaw: "He relinquished everything to serve the Republic." For the poem, however, Lowell changed the epigraph to read, "They relinquished everything to serve the Republic." The change democratizes the inscription to honor the men of the African American volunteer regiment along with their leader. This change focuses the poem's trajectory even before the reader begins.

Stanza 1

The poem opens with the speaker's nostalgia. The setting is desolate yet holds a promise in the past beauties of a local Boston attraction. The speaker's use of the present tense confirms the persistence of this memory.

In this stanza, the reader sees the past through the eyes of the speaker, who views the destruction and construction from the present day. The first line is not end-stopped—that is, it is unpunctuated. The final word, stands, creates a presence and an emphasis: possibly "stands for" is implied. The image "Sahara of snow" further complicates matters: heat is contrasted to cold as wetness is to the dry "airy tanks" of the last line.

Stanza 2

The speaker moves to the past tense and uses sensory images in reminiscing about childhood visits to the Aquarium. A nose crawling "like a snail on the glass" suggests a child's runny nose pressed against a cool, glass surface. To this sensory image the speaker adds a hand that tingles as though it had a mind of its own, wishing or intending "to burst the bubbles." Most significant, the fish are "cowed, compliant." The implication is they have been trapped, removed from their natural habitat, and deprived of their way of life. The situation of the fish in the Aquarium parallels the situation of American slavery and the conditions African Americans faced historically and were facing in the mid-20th century when the poem was written.

Stanzas 3–4

Stanza 3 opens in the present tense. Readers may begin to wonder if the poem will alternate this way throughout. In the (adult) present, the speaker—clearly the poet, Robert Lowell—sighs and thinks about the primitive world of flora and fauna of the Aquarium. It is not a thinking man's world at all. He seems to be free-associating. But the primitive garden is long past. In a shift to the past tense and a past time in his adult experience, he recalls the day last March when he pressed against a "barbed and galvanized / fence," a far cry from the Aquarium's glass. The reader encounters another line with no end punctuation and a break mid-sentence. This poetic device, enjambment, sets up readers' anticipation, as they must read further, to the next stanza, to find out what the speaker is leaning against.

This poet plays with words. It's not so smart to lean against a barbed wire fence, but possibly it is the words that are "barbed," or pointed, and the poet who can't be "galvanized" into action. With these double meanings, created by the pause between stanzas, the poem operates on two levels: one physical and real, as in barbed wire, and the other abstract, as in the concept of barbed words. The experiential world is doubled as well: the recollection of the March morning is adult, but the poet presses against the fence in a mode of innocent inquiry just as the child-poet pressed against the Aquarium's glass.

Stanza 4 continues in the past tense. The fence on the Common becomes a cage behind which steam shovels, like huge animal-like creatures, are grunting and guzzling "tons of mush and grass." The metaphor of monsters describes the movements of the shovels, prepared to "gouge"—a violent verb—an "underworld" garage. The use of underworld rather than underground relates to the "dark downward and vegetating kingdom" of the preceding stanza. It is as though the modern machine has consumed the raw nature of the primordial scene. Rather than "compliant" fish, destructive dinosaurs are now in command.

There is also a cartoon quality to those animated shovels gorging on mush. The scene takes readers back to the realm of "cowed" fish and a poet who pushed against the fence with the same eagerness that a child visitor would press against the glass of a tank in the Aquarium. The poem is evolving as a childlike narrative while commenting in an adult fashion on concerns of the present. The reader, moving with the poem between past and present, witnesses waves of history impacting the present time.

Stanza 5

This stanza is in the present tense. A number of inanimate elements are animated or personified. The point of view, however, is that of an adult. Here "parking spaces luxuriate." Given the scene and the language describing it, the speaker is not happy about the present action: a parking garage on the spot of a poignant childhood memory. The speaker seems critical of this "progress."

Readers might question the sexualized sensory diction of this stanza. The parking spaces that luxuriate like "sandpiles in the heart of Boston" evoke images of people lying on beaches. And in the next lines "A girdle ... of girders / braces the tingling Statehouse." The girdle is an undergarment. Because this sensory language occurs in a present-tense stanza, readers might ask what the speaker is feeling about the excavations for a new parking garage. Something about it is compelling for him.

Stanza 6

This stanza is written in the present tense, although the scene is imagined. That is, it is unlikely the Statehouse is shaking, although one can appreciate the precariousness of the grand, historic building. Given the heavy construction, the speaker literally feels the ground and the buildings around him shake. The Statehouse in fact faces the Common and Augustus Saint-Gaudens's commemorative bas-relief sculpture—also described as precariously sited because of the excavation.

Most arresting, besides the potentially catastrophic instability in the scene, is the odd diction—particularly, the "bell-cheeked" infantry and a monument propped by a "plank splint" against an "earthquake." In language that has sensory impact, the poem calls attention to violence. The soldiers' bell-like cheeks are round and full, indicating their youth and innocence as they march off to war. And by an odd or childish logic, perhaps the bells of the infantry's cheeks ring out with some sort of sorrowful truth. A "plank splint" seems much too narrow or weak for the nature of protection it must offer. And splint suggests "splinters," thin and pointed objects that stick in the skin.

The key to this stanza is physical instability. In the first stanza, such instability is a consequence of neglect and the passage of time. However, in this stanza, it is a consequence of progress threatening venerated objects of the past: the historic Statehouse (with its "Golden Dome"), completed in 1798, and the 1895 monument commemorating the Massachusetts 54th and its leader. The reader also might note the mental or cognitive instability caused by this stanza, which raises questions without answers.

Stanza 7

The stanza shifts back to the past. The speaker recalls the fate of the 54th Regiment: within two months, half of Colonel Shaw's black volunteer regiment was dead. At the commemoration ceremony, which took place three decades after the war, the noted philosopher and psychologist William James commended the life-like art of Saint-Gaudens and lauded his own response to the plaque. This stanza is straightforward in diction, quiet in tone, and slowed by four end-stopped lines. It comments on the unfortunate situational irony of the sacrifice of the soldiers, who were practically unnoted in the commemoration ceremony.

Stanza 8

The stanza begins with a simile and odd personification: this monument, a rectangular plaque "sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat." Once again, the image is of fish, connecting the image of the Aquarium and its "cowed, compliant" fish to the sentiments of the larger populace. The feeling seems clear to the speaker. The memory is an irritation, even if the relation between fishbone and monument is odd. This oddness, in fact, focuses the reader's attention, for the small fishbone sends a big message. A fishbone caught in the throat is a persistent irritation. Similarly, the monument is a commemoration that irritates—not the usual function for a civic monument. The temperament of the city is in question.

The stanza continues with more images of thin, pointed objects and, again, an odd comparison. The Colonel is as thin as the needle of a compass. A compass needle wavers or shakes, pointing back to the instability of Stanza 6. Here, though, the compass establishes a clear direction. And it is Shaw, after all, who has a true moral compass, even as he faces opposition in choosing to lead a black regiment.

Stanza 9

The speaker returns to the present tense. Once again, the reader is privy to the consciousness of the poet. The lines are nearly even in length, and each has end punctuation. The adjectives describe the Colonel as alternately angry and vigilant, gentle yet wary, averse to pleasure, and longing for privacy. All his qualities, as represented in the engraved image, receive equal weight, although the pairs are contradictory.

Wrenlike is the adjective that seems to raise questions. Wrens are small, common birds whose size accounts for their vigilance. Anger is an attitude of people, not birds. The "wrenlike" Colonel is not big or significant in the eyes of the public. Indeed his egalitarian attitude toward leading black men is disturbing, even in the speaker's present time. The Colonel's moral compass works well. His whole, lean body and his strong will point to what is right. The problem lies with the fact that little has changed from Shaw's lifetime to the time in which the poem is written. In the 1950s and 1960s, in fact, the country was embroiled in conflict over civil rights and the continuing legacies of the Civil War.

Stanza 10

A new metaphor, "He is out of bounds now," draws the reader's attention. He is "out of bounds," beyond criticism, because he is part of the past. The juxtaposition of life and death as the "lovely, peculiar power" is striking both because of the odd diction—for example, "lovely"—and the notion of courage described in the contrast of the power "to choose life and die." Colonel Shaw cannot shrink from this choice, and it becomes a reality when he "leads his black soldiers to death." He sets an example, and his courageous choice becomes their choice as well. In this sense, the white leader and his black soldiers are equals, as they all gave their lives for their country.

Stanza 11

Just as the Aquarium in the first stanza serves as a quintessential Boston setting, the "old white churches" on village greens set another New England scene. They are old and white and have served generations that are as old and as white as the buildings: the American founding families. The "rebellion" is the American Revolution led by the founding families, including the poet's ancestors. Also old are the "frayed flags" of the Civil War dead. The word that stands out here is the verb quilt. If the leaders of the revolution were white and elite, the soldiers of the Union army, buried in the old white churches, are all white but of local, less aristocratic origins. Again, the poem is moving toward the speaker's view of the United States, with its tenets—and its limits—of equality. The quest for equality is the fishbone in the throat of Bostonians.

Moreover, revolutionary acts and predictable resistance persist. Critics Helen Vendler and Michael Thurston both point to the changes in Boston politics at the time: the shift from the governance by the Boston Brahmin class (rich, old New England families) to the Irish Americans who began a program to modernize the city, including the demolition of historic structures like the Aquarium. This shift in power and perspective, from historical concerns to modernization, is echoed in the poem. Also key is the escalation of racial tensions between African Americans and working-class Irish in the inner city, while the campaign for integration in the public schools was intensifying in the southern states. Television brought the images of strain to all.

Stanza 12

In this dream-like stanza, the stone statues "grow"—an odd verb—as their forms diminish and their ages decline. Change is the passage of time in which the significance of the heroic past and its monuments declines. The stanza is sleepy, part of a waking dream. To the visitor at the village green or to the casual passerby in the downtown square or traffic circle, the significance of the commemorative statues of Union soldiers has been lost. The statues are sleepy relics. Alert attention to the heroes of the past has failed. It persists only in stone. The commemorative monument endures, but historical memory fades. As time passes, the observers get older, and the sculpted figures seem younger, more distant, like memories.

The sound of this stanza reinforces the dream. The poem, up to this point, has developed from a conversational tone and vocabulary. This stanza, by contrast, is dominated by quiet, alliterative consonant sounds—s, m, and w—aided by soft vowels, particularly o and u at the close of the stanza: "wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets / and muse through their sideburns."

The stanza ends with an ellipsis, an odd bit of punctuation for a poet who is not lost for words. In this case, the ellipsis could indicate the dream of the dead soldier, who muses "though his sideburns," an eternity of dreams. The ellipsis may signal the trailing off or fading continuity of dreams, a silence made eternal somewhere in the white space between this stanza and the next.

Stanza 13

Sympathetic to the choices his son had made, Colonel Shaw's father demonstrates his conviction. As an officer, his son was entitled to a local burial with full military honors—just as the bodies of the white soldiers were entitled to lie in the graveyards of the "old white churches." However, the father understands his son's body must lie where it fell, with his regiment. This gesture of parental respect is in direct contrast to the irritable notion of the commemorative plaque, sticking like a fishbone in the throats of Bostonians. The entirely appropriate "ditch" in this stanza returns the reader to the excavation threatening the stability of the Statehouse and the Civil War monument to Colonel Shaw in Stanza 6. This ditch is a metaphor for an insidious racial abyss.

To continue the focus on diction in this stanza, one might assume the use of the pejorative term "niggers" in quotation marks in the poem is verbally ironic. The poem recalls both the historical use of the term by white people and the acknowledgement of the abhorrent racial slur by the 1960s. Lowell read this poem at the Boston Arts Festival held on the Common in 1960. No matter the solicitude of his delivery, it is not difficult to imagine how the word and the irony of the usage at that moment hung in the air.

Stanza 14

There is a remarkable shift in the first line of this stanza. The "ditch is nearer" because Shaw's final rest has been carried into the reader's present, and the source of instability below the monument and near where the poet stands is widening. Thus past and present, abstract and real, meet in the poem and in the experience of the reader. The speaker notes the absence of World War II statues on the Common, an absence that may imply Americans no longer seem to honor their dead or their history by erecting monuments. Instead (if the semicolon is a signal that the line to follow is closely related to the one the reader has just read), there is a "commercial photograph," a modern mode of representation in, presumably, a shop window on an adjacent business street. The image in the familiar photo is presented with an unfamiliar image. Hiroshima, the Japanese city devastated by an American atomic bomb at the end of World War II in 1945, is "boiling." This poem, from the childlike reminiscence of the opening and, in fact, throughout, traffics in sensory memory. The sensational mushroom cloud remains capable of injury. The injury here is the manner in which the image of the mushroom explosion is exploited and remembered for economic gain, while the loss of life during World War II has no local monuments.

Stanza 15

Yet another shock opens Stanza 15: the photograph is an advertisement for Mosler safes, a further abuse of a historical photograph for commercial purposes. Thus, a central theme is succinctly expressed. Time and change do not mean progress. Without a historical memory, the push for material success is empty and, for the Boston Brahmin in Lowell, emotionally disturbing and vulgar.

In the preceding stanza, the ditch is nearer. In this stanza, "Space is nearer." The answer to this puzzle appears in the next line. Television makes space "nearer." Faces of "Negro school-children" are "drained"—something like those empty tanks in the abandoned South Boston Aquarium. The children have been deprived of decent schools and proper educations. The television shows a crowd of faces, almost like a bundle of balloons. And the speaker is crouched, his face close to the screen. This is, of course, a reprise of the poet as a young boy whose face is pressed to theAquarium's tank glass. And the balloons are related to the fish bubbles of Stanza 1. Just as Shaw's father empathizes with his son's choices and values, the speaker here has a natural empathy for the young people he observes. Like the nearness of the ditch in the preceding stanza, he is affected emotionally by the physical proximity of statues of black soldiers and the television's ability to bring black children close to his gaze. The statues were oppressed by the enemy, while the black children have been oppressed by ignorance.

Stanza 16

The first two lines recall the image of Yankee Doodle who comes to town "riding on a pony." Colonel Shaw, however, rides a bubble, easily burst. Waiting for change, "he waits" in vain.

Stanza 17

"Everywhere" ends the first line: there is an abyss between this big noun hanging off the end of the sentence and the next line with its image of American decadence. The present holds giant-finned cars, which return the reader to the poem's opening. A circle has been drawn by an invisible school of fish and the mechanical wonders nosing forward like fish, the four-wheeled finned emblems of modern American wealth. There is no turning back, although the past lives in the present.

The final lines return to the preponderance of s sounds, which recall the muted and lost dreams of the Union dead of Stanza 12. But the soft vowels of Stanza 12 have been replaced by stronger sounds: long o, e, and i. The long i of slides cuts like a knife through grease in the last line. There is nothing heroic about the current revolution, which has depersonalized both history and humanity.

It is not that the poem is prophetic. Rather, Lowell, in daring to write a lyric poem that is a tribute to the American historical past, has also written a political poem that embodies, like the tingling and shaking of the Statehouse, the instabilities of the political present. Like a tragic play, the poem in its conclusion creates a shivering sensation of pity and terror—and sadness, a sigh from the past that carries readers "nearer" to the abyss. Violence is the undercurrent of this lyric poem. The "underworld" garage holds the memories of violence that persist to plague the speaker in terms of his own troubled history and that of African Americans in the United States.