The Full Text of “For the Union Dead”
The Full Text of “For the Union Dead”
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“For the Union Dead” Introduction
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American Confessionalist poet Robert Lowell published "For the Union Dead" in a collection of the same title in 1964. The poem's speaker reflects on American history while looking gloomily on a changing Boston Common. After gazing at the ruined South Boston Aquarium (which the speaker remembers visiting as a child), the speaker's attention turns to a monument honoring Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw: the leader of a volunteer regiment of Black soldiers during the American Civil War. Admiring the courage of Shaw and his men, the speaker is driven to reflect that their spirit of heroic self-sacrifice is in short supply in a modern United States riven by segregation, commercialism, and insincerity, "slid[ing] by on grease."
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“For the Union Dead” Summary
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The speaker describes the ruins of the South Boston Aquarium, which looks as if it's lost in a desert of snow. The building's windows are broken and boarded up, its bronze fish weathervane is worse for the wear, and the old fish tanks inside are empty.
When the speaker was a child, they used to press their nose to the glass of those aquarium tanks, their fingers itching with longing to pop the bubbles rising up from the noses of the nervous fish within.
The speaker now pulls their hand back from that imaginary glass, thinking wistfully of those murky old tanks in which fish and reptiles lived their slow lives. Last spring the speaker pressed their faces to a chainlink fence.
They were standing on Boston Common, watching steam shovels huge as dinosaurs digging up an underground garage as if they were grazing on mud and grass.
Now, more and more garages are growing in the heart of Boston, comfortably spreading out like heaps of sand. Bright orange scaffolding, the color of pumpkins on a pilgrim's table, surrounds the shaking Statehouse while the steam shovels dig.
The Statehouse, the speaker observes, faces a monument to Colonel Shaw, depicted among his round-cheeked regiment of Black American soldiers in a famous relief statue by Saint-Gaudens. Someone has braced the statue with planks so it won't fall over in the chaos of the parking garage's construction.
Two months after the regiment depicted on that statue marched through Boston, the speaker says, half of them died. When the statue was dedicated, the writer William James observed that he felt as if he could hear the Black soldiers breathing.
Now, their monument feels uncomfortably out of place in the changing city. In his statue, the Colonel looks as slim and upright as a compass's needle.
He looks as angry and alert as a little bird, as gently poised as a greyhound. He looks like he's flinching away from idle pleasure, desperate for a little privacy.
He seems very far away from the present day. He celebrates humanity's strange and beautiful ability to protect life by dying for it. When he led his soldiers to battle, the speaker thinks, he sat bolt upright.
Now, old churches across New England still have a faint whiff of sincere resistance about them. Tattered flags make a patchwork across the graveyards of dead Union soldiers.
The statues honoring dead Union soldiers look thinner and younger every year. With their narrow waists, these idealized soldiers lean on guns and daydream, wearing long 19th-century sideburns.
When Colonel Shaw was killed, his father didn't want him to have a monument. He said that he wanted Shaw's only memorial to be the ditch where Shaw and the Black men of his regiment (people whom the Confederate commanders had referred to with a racial slur) were buried.
The ditch feels closer to the speaker now than the memorial does. There aren't any statues honoring World War II here, the speaker observes. Instead, over on Boylston Street, the speaker sees a picture of Hiroshima burning up.
This picture is being used to advertise safes that can survive nuclear warfare. Meanwhile, outer space feels closer than it ever has before. When the speaker watches TV, they see the black-and-white, airy faces of Black schoolkids floating past like balloons.
Meanwhile, Colonel Shaw sits astride a bubble, waiting for it to gloriously pop.
The Aquarium is gone for good, the speaker says. Around it, endless huge cars nudge forward like fish. Citizens engage in a kind of brutal, thoughtless people-pleasing, slithering around as if they were oiled.
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“For the Union Dead” Themes
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The Importance of History and Memory
"For the Union Dead" is an elegy (a poem of grief) that mourns a world in decline. The poem's speaker looks around at Boston, the city they grew up in, and sees in it a vision of loss. Boston has changed for the worse, the speaker feels, and so has the United States as a whole. The poem suggests that the country's incomplete ability to fully honor, remember, and learn from the past has led to a sad and dangerous moral decay.
As the poem begins, the speaker contemplates the "old South Boston Aquarium"—a grand building they loved to visit as a child. But now (in the 1960s, when the poem takes place), the Aquarium has fallen into ruin. The speaker's nostalgic childhood memories of chasing fish around, their nose "crawl[ing] like a snail on the glass," leads them to reflect on everything else Boston has lost.
As the Aquarium's decline suggests, the city seems no longer to respect its own history. Even as the speaker watches, a corner of Boston Common itself—the oldest public park in the United States, a place laden with significance—is getting dug up to create what the speaker darkly calls an "underworld garage," an underground parking structure. The venerable "Statehouse" seems threatened by this change too: it's surrounded by protective scaffolding, but still "tingling" and "shaking" under the onslaught of construction. This symbolic image suggests that the city's history is itself under attack. An ordinary parking garage gets pride of place in Boston, and thus thoughtlessly undermines Boston's legacy. The people who would tear up a historical spot like this for the sake of convenient parking clearly don't much respect or value the story of American independence.
Likewise braced against construction damage is a famous monument honoring Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment (a Black volunteer regiment that made a tragic, heroic assault on a Confederate fortress during the Civil War). A hundred years since the 54th Regiment made its sacrifice, the speaker observes, the country seems to have forgotten such principles—and forgotten how to remember, too. "There are no statues for the last war here," the speaker says, alluding to World War II. The only commemoration of that war's horrors appears in an advertisement for a safe company that crassly uses a picture of a bombed Hiroshima to suggest its wares are sturdy.
The fact that Boston in particular and the United States in general no longer seem to respect—or perhaps even fully remember—their own history strikes this poem's speaker as a troubling and tragic sign of ethical decay. The ability to remember and honor the past, the poem suggests, has a lot to do with the ability to go on building a better and nobler world. To the speaker's eye, the U.S. seems to be sliding into a "savage servility" (a brutal, spineless, and self-serving attitude) in large part because it has lost its commitment to history and memory, and thus to its own founding ideals.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-68
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Civil Rights, Black Heroism, and Racism
"For The Union Dead" honors one group of Union soldiers in particular: the 54th Regiment, a Civil War regiment which was composed mostly of Black soldiers (and is now memorialized in a statue on Boston Common). Led by Colonel Shaw, a white abolitionist who became the leader of the this regiment not long after the Emancipation Proclamation declared that Black men should be allowed to join the Union army, the 54th made a famously heroic attack on an important Confederate fort. Shaw and nearly half his forces were killed in the battle, but their courage (and the tragedy of their deaths) became legendary in the Union states, standing as an inspiring example of Black bravery and patriotism.
Gazing at the statue of Shaw and the 54th Regiment, the speaker finds that the long and bloody Civil War struggle to end slavery in the United States still resonates in the 1960s. When the speaker turns on the news, they see images of the "drained faces of Negro school-children" on their TV (likely an allusion to the desegregation of schools, but also potentially to the violence that marked the racist white backlash against the civil rights movement). Black Americans, the speaker sees, are still struggling for equal rights and fair treatment, sacrificing, fighting, and dying for an ideal just as Shaw and the 54th did.
Looking at the memorial statue on Boston Common, the poem's speaker thus feels both inspired and discouraged. While Black Americans are still fighting for their freedom, it's depressing that they still have to fight for their freedom 100 years after this statue went up. And meanwhile, much of the world around them lacks that sense of mission and self-sacrifice. In 1960s America, the speaker laments, a "savage servility"—an essentially brutal kind of compliance and complacency—seems to rule the roost. The Black people struggling for civil rights, the poem suggests, preserve a deeply American courage and idealism that much of the rest of the country seems to have lost.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 11-68
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Consumerism and Materialism in American Culture
The speaker of "For the Union Dead" gazes with dismay upon a United States that has traded its ideals for a selfish materialism. Looking around Boston Common in the 1960s, the speaker sees plenty of ghosts of more gracious, thoughtful, and heroic times in American history. The old "Statehouse" speaks of the Revolutionary War and the fight for independence; the monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment speaks of the Civil War and the battle to unite the country and end slavery.
But no such monuments are going up these days. As the speaker remarks, "there are no statues for the last war here"—that is, no monuments to the dead of World War II. Instead, memories of that war appear only in the form of a "commercial photograph" that uses a picture of "Hiroshima boiling" to advertise a "Mosler Safe." This crass advertisement privileges the survival of a bank safe over the horrible deaths of a hundred thousand people at American hands: in this ad, it matters more that valuables survive the blast than that people do. Tellingly, the ad refers to the safe as the "'Rock of Ages,'" a turn of phrase used to refer to God in an old hymn. Money, the speaker implies, has become the presiding deity of the United States.
American materialism is also on show in the construction on Boston Common. Parts of this venerable old park are being torn up to build what the speaker grimly calls an "underworld garage"—an underground parking structure in which people can park their ostentatious "giant finned cars," humongous vehicles intended to show off their drivers' wealth.
Where money is king, the speaker concludes with disgust, a respect for history, ideals, and human life itself goes out the window pretty fast. Steered by a "servil[e]," cowardly materialism, much of America seems to have lost its very decency.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 11-18
- Lines 54-58
- Lines 65-68
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The Fading of American Idealism
Juxtaposed with crass advertisements and thoughtless construction projects, a monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment (a famous regiment of Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War) makes the speaker feel as if the U.S. has lost something important: the kind of principled courage that led Shaw and his soldiers to fight and die. American ideals, "For the Union Dead" suggests, are in tragic decline.
Gazing at the memorial to the soldiers of the 54th Regiment, the speaker of Lowell’s poem sees Shaw and his men as icons of a distinctly American kind of idealism, humility, and moral uprightness. In the speaker's eyes, the statue of Shaw doesn't speak of any egotistical longing for glory or fame. Indeed, the statue "seems to wince at pleasure, / and suffocate for privacy," as if Shaw wouldn't even have liked being celebrated so publicly. What mattered to Shaw and the 54th, the speaker suggests, was not self-aggrandizing public heroism, but principle and justice: the preservation of the Union and the abolishment of slavery. The statue of Shaw speaks of the "lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die"—to sacrifice oneself for a cause, seeing the collective life of the country as more important than one's own little life.
While the speaker still sees Black Americans fighting with similar self-sacrificing courage in the civil rights movement, they lament that the U.S. as a whole no longer seems to value this kind of idealistic morality. Instead, Boston chooses parking garages over historic preservation; materialistic citizens show off their wealth with gigantic flashy cars; Black Americans still don't have equal rights; and a "savage servility," a crude and cowardly spirit of going along to get along, steers the country.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 21-68
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “For the Union Dead”
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Lines 1-8
The old South ...
... cowed, compliant fish."For the Union Dead" begins with a look at a ruin. The poem's speaker gazes at the "old South Boston Aquarium," a "broken" building with boarded-up windows that now "stands / in a Sahara of snow." Once, readers can tell, this was a splendid old place, many-windowed and adorned with a "bronze weathervane cod." Now, that cod has "lost half its scales." And inside the building, the "airy tanks" that once held many fish stand "dry" and empty.
The speaker remembers this aquarium in better days. "Once," long ago, they recall, their "nose crawled like a snail on the glass"—a simile that conjures up a little kid leaving a slimy nose trail behind them as, fascinated, they follow the progress of a fish across a tank. Like any kid admiring a fish tank, the young speaker wanted to mess with those fish; their hand "tingled" with eagerness to "burst the bubbles" the passing fish left behind them. The fish, safe behind glass, nevertheless struck the speaker as "cowed" and "compliant," nervously resigned to captivity and to being pestered by children.
The speaker, then, has a full and vivid memory of their time at the aquarium. Even as they look at a building that's on the verge of falling down, they feel as if they're gazing into the past, when they and the aquarium were both younger and fresher. The poem's images of youthful excitement juxtaposed with melancholy decay set this poem's tone. "For the Union Dead" will be an elegy, a poem of mourning, exploring many kinds of loss—sudden and gradual alike.
Robert Lowell frames this free verse poem in neat quatrains (or four-line stanzas), creating a regular and steady shape on the page. Within those quatrains, though, varied rhythms and line lengths capture emotion and create drama. Listen to what happens when the speaker remembers their childhood fascination with the fish in stanza 2, for instance:
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.Those breathlessly short and enjambed lines in the middle of the stanza help to evoke both the speaker's longing and the frustration: their tingly desire to pop those inaccessible bubbles gets cut short.
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Lines 9-16
My hand draws ...
... their underworld garage. -
Lines 17-28
Parking spaces luxuriate ...
... bronze Negroes breathe. -
Lines 29-40
Their monument sticks ...
... bend his back. -
Lines 41-48
On a thousand ...
... . . . -
Lines 49-52
Shaw's father wanted ...
... with his "niggers." -
Lines 53-60
The ditch is ...
... rise like balloons. -
Lines 61-68
Colonel Shaw ...
... by on grease.
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“For the Union Dead” Symbols
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Monuments and Memorials
The sculptural monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment symbolizes a lost, idealized American heroism and a fading national memory. Looking on the monument, the speaker is driven to reflect on the Regiment's rare courage and moral backbone—in particular, the inner strength of Shaw, who led the Regiment's fateful charge on the Confederate Fort Wagner. Such qualities, the speaker feels, are in short supply in modern America.
The Shaw on the monument, represented in bronze, becomes emblematic of all the self-sacrificing idealism the speaker feels the country has lost. The monument preserves the memory of Shaw and his soldiers, but it also serves as a reminder that their courage belongs to the past. These days, the monument has to be propped up with a "plank splint" to keep it from falling over in the rumbles of construction from a nearby parking lot. That disruptive construction suggests that a new and more materialistic world is replacing the world that produced Shaw (to the speaker's dismay).
Other Civil War statuary plays a similar role here, too, suggesting the limits of memory and the depredations of time. The "stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier" that dot the New England countryside honor the Civil War dead but also remind those who view them that too many people died to be honored individually. (These statues' "wasp-waisted," youthful profiles also remind the speaker they're not getting any younger themselves!)
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 21-40: “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.”
- Lines 45-48: “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 . . .”
- Lines 49-52: “Shaw's father wanted no monument / except the ditch, / where his son's body was thrown / and lost with his "niggers."”
- Lines 61-64: “Colonel Shaw / is riding on his bubble, / he waits / for the blessèd break.”
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The Aquarium
The "old South Boston Aquarium," now a ruin, becomes a symbol of the lost past. When the speaker was a child, they remember, they used to love watching the fish in the old Aquarium. In particular, they remember how their "hand tingled" with longing to "burst the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish." This vision presents the contents of the Aquarium as delightful things just out of reach—and thus parallels the speaker's nostalgia for a lost childhood and a lost America.
"I often sigh still / for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom" at the bottom of the Aquarium's tanks, the speaker says. But now more than ever, that kingdom is inaccessible: at the time the poem is set, the Aquarium is only a ruin, and the speaker is a jaded adult.
The speaker eventually links the fishy kingdom in the Aquarium with other fragile, lost things. For instance, the kind of self-sacrificing idealism that motivated Colonel Shaw to lead his regiment over the walls of Fort Wagner appears as a symbolic "bubble" he rides—a bubble like the ones the speaker used to chase.
The Aquarium now lies in ruins. Its destruction and neglect makes it a fitting symbol of everything the speaker feels is lost: their childhood, the Boston they knew, and the kind of courage and principle that they see memorialized in the monument to Shaw and the 54th Regiment.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-11: “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.”
- Line 65: “The Aquarium is gone.”
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The Steamshovels and the Parking Garage
The steamshovels that "crop[] up tons of mush and grass" to build a parking garage on Boston Common symbolize a distinctly American disrespect for its past and destruction of ideals. All through this poem, the speaker watches as images of Boston's (and the whole United States's) past are threatened or even destroyed by new construction. That construction, the speaker observes, is rarely an improvement. As the huge "yellow dinosaur steamshovels" dig, the old "Statehouse" quakes, the monument to the 54th Regiment rattles, and the "old South Boston Aquarium" wastes away behind broken and boarded-up windows. Beautiful, idealistic, and inspiring relics of the past, in other words, aren't being carefully preserved; nor are they being joined by new monuments to American achievement and ideals. Instead, the city is getting torn up for the sake of nothing more than parking garages, places for people to stow their gigantic and ostentatious cars.
In the speaker's view, such so-called construction is in fact a kind of destruction. By building only ugly, materialistic new structures, Boston is starting to efface its own history. That loss parallels what the speaker sees as a wider loss of American idealism and ethical aspiration.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 11-21: “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,”
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The Mosler Safe Advertisement
Wandering through Boston, the poem's speaker is appalled to see an advertisement for the Mosler Safe company (a company that built bank safes) that uses an image of a bombed-out Hiroshima to hawk its wares. (A Mosler safe famously survived the explosion of an American nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, killing 100,000 people.) This ad claims that the safe is as reliable as the "Rock of Ages": in other words, as trustworthy and sturdy as God (once called the "rock of ages" in an old hymn). In the poem, this cynical advertisement becomes a symbol of mindless American consumerism and commercialism. Money has become a kind of god, the speaker's description of the advertisement suggests. A safe that protects valuables through nuclear warfare is treated as the big event, more important than the thousands of human lives being snuffed out in the background. For that matter, selling even more of those safes seems more important to the bigwigs at Mosler than, say, not using images of the mass killing of civilians to make a buck.
The Mosler Safe ad, the speaker further observes, is the only monument "for the last war" in sight. While the Civil War monument honoring Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment stands proudly on Boston Common, World War II is commemorated only with crass advertisements. History itself here becomes a mere commodity.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 55-58: “on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph / shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" / that survived the blast.”
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“For the Union Dead” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
Vivid imagery throughout "For the Union Dead" makes the speaker's wistful snapshot of a moment in Boston's history feel alive and concrete. For example, the poem begins with a portrait of a ruin. As the speaker gazes at the “old South Boston Aquarium”—a place they were very fond of as a child—they note the signs of its decay one by one:
Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.Each of these images suggests a slow process of decline. The windows broke, then were boarded up; the poor old bronze cod dropped its scales one by one; the tanks were, at some point, slowly drained, no longer filled with water but with air. This imagery implies neglect.
That neglect feels particularly painful to the speaker because they have so many fond memories of their childhood visits to this aquarium. Those memories are so vivid they can still feel them in their body: they remember how their “hand tingled” with longing to “burst the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish” in the tanks. This image of visceral, mischievous childhood excitement stands in sharp contrast to the hollow creakiness of the Aquarium today.
The speaker’s strong feelings about those lost fish start to suggest their general feeling that they’ve lost something bigger, too. When they think wistfully of the “dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile” that used to fascinate them, they seem also to be thinking of the dark downward kingdom of the past—a place that now feels as murky, fascinating, and inaccessible to the speaker as those glassed-off fish once were.
In the place of the fish and the aquarium, new things are coming to Boston—things that make the speaker feel somewhere between uneasy and disgusted. They observe that, behind a “new galvanized and barbed fence”—a shiny barbed-wire enclosure—“yellow dinosaur steamshovels” are busy “cropp[ing] up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their underworld garage.” The city is building a new underground parking structure, in other words, and drafting in monstrous, greedy-seeming machines to do the work. The speaker’s image of the garage as a violent “gouge” in the ground dug by huge, beastly yellow machines suggests that this change feels like an assault on the Boston they once knew.
So does their observation of the “tingling Statehouse,” inadequately protected from the shaking of the construction by a brace of “orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders” (bright orange metal scaffolding). That “Puritan-pumpkin” orange raises sentimental legends of the birth of the modern United States—Puritan colonists sharing a pumpkin pie at the first Thanksgiving, say.
The association chimes with the historic “Statehouse” that Boston is trying to keep from falling down. But it also evokes a rude, bright, traffic-cone color that clashes awfully with the beauty of that old building. The monument to the 54th Regiment, too, is braced with a plank and “shaking” under the assault of construction. These moments of imagery underscore the symbolic role of the monument and the Statehouse as representatives of a self-sacrificing, idealistic kind of American spirit—one the speaker worries is now on the verge of being destroyed.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Lines 2-4: “Its broken windows are boarded. / The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. / The airy tanks are dry.”
- Lines 6-8: “my hand tingled / to burst the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.”
- Lines 10-11: “the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile”
- Lines 12-13: “the new barbed and galvanized / fence on the Boston Common”
- Lines 14-16: “yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting / as they cropped up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their underworld garage.”
- Lines 19-21: “A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders / braces the tingling Statehouse, / shaking over the excavations,”
- Line 22: “bell-cheeked Negro infantry”
- Lines 33-34: “He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, / a greyhound's gentle tautness;”
- Lines 41-44: “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.”
- Lines 45-46: “The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier / grow slimmer and younger each year—”
- Lines 55-57: “a commercial photograph / shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe”
- Line 60: “the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons”
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Allusion
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Alliteration
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"For the Union Dead" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Compliant
- Cowed
- Vegetating
- Galvanized
- Barbed
- Cropped up
- Gouge
- Luxuriate
- Girdle
- Girders
- Colonel Shaw, the Infantry, and St. Gaudens
- Bell-cheeked
- Relief
- Splint
- William James
- Vigilance
- Wasp-waisted
- Shaw's father wanted no monument
- Mosler Safe
- Hiroshima
- Rock of Ages
- Servility
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(Location in poem: Line 8: “the noses of the cowed, compliant fish”)
By this, the speaker means that the fish do what they're told.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “For the Union Dead”
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Form
"For the Union Dead" is an elegy, a poem honoring the dead—in this case, the "Union Dead," the soldiers who died defending the Union in the American Civil War. But really, this is an elegy for more than just a specific group of soldiers. Lowell also uses this poem to mourn for an ideal of heroism, for a lost America, for the South Boston Aquarium he loved so much as a child. Perhaps readers might even take this poem as an elegy for an ideal of America.
It's no coincidence that this poem takes place in Boston: one of the most important cities of the American Revolutionary period, it's the place where an early vision of the United States was shaped. It's also the city where Lowell was born and raised. This elegy works on a personal and a national level at once.
Lowell expresses his pensive, melancholy reflections in free verse, without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. But he also measures the poem's 68 lines out neatly in 17 quatrains (or four-line stanzas), creating a fairly regular appearance on the page. That careful pacing makes the poem feel deliberate and thoughtful, an effect that matches the speaker's unhurried demeanor as they pause on Boston Common to ponder the past and the present.
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Meter
"For the Union Dead" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. Instead, Lowell uses flexible line lengths to create emotional and musical effects.
Much of the poem uses fairly long, complex lines. This description of the old war history still perceptible in New England, for instance, stretches every line out at comfortable length:
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.These lines feel as broad and even as the greens and graveyards they describe. But occasionally, when introducing a particularly striking, strange, or intense image, Lowell shrinks his lines down almost to vanishing, as in stanza 16:
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.These enigmatic words feel tight and tense, as full of anticipation as Colonel Shaw in his long "wait[]." In this way, the poem's shape helps to bring its ideas and emotions to life.
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no rhyme scheme in "For the Union Dead" because there's no rhyme, period! This free verse poem makes music in other ways. The first stanza, for example, whispers and rings with sibilance and alliteration:
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.The soft /s/ and /z/ sibilance here evokes the forlorn hush of a snowy day. The blunt, hard /b/ and /br/ alliteration, meanwhile, captures in sound just how "broken" and battered the defunct aquarium looks these days. Moments like this give the poem a hint of music, but avoid the more obviously crafted and formal mood of regular rhymes, helping the speaker's voice to sound authentic, contemporary, and direct.
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“For the Union Dead” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a person in a melancholy, reflective mood. Standing outside the ruin of the "old South Boston Aquarium," they fall into thoughts about their happy childhood days there. And the more they look around them, the more they begin to feel that times past might have been better in every way.
Depressed by the construction of endless new parking lots right in the "heart" of a historic and dignified city, disgusted by ads that use images of a bombed Hiroshima to hawk safes, this speaker doesn't see a lot to like about the modern world. Wistfully, they look to a monument on Boston Common celebrating the heroism of the 54th Infantry Regiment (a Black volunteer regiment that fought for the Union during the Civil War) and reflect that Colonel Shaw, the leader of that regiment, had a "compass-needle" uprightness, a moral sense of direction that a selfish, insular, greedy modern America seems to lack.
This speaker, in short, sounds a lot like Robert Lowell himself. A noted Confessionalist poet (and native Bostonian), Lowell typically wrote poetry from his own perspective. This poem captures his gloomy thoughts and feelings about a country in decline—and about the losses and changes in his own life.
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“For the Union Dead” Setting
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"For the Union Dead" is set in Boston, the city where Robert Lowell was born and raised. The speaker feels a clear affection for the old city, with its storied park (Boston Common is the oldest public park in the U.S.) and its layers upon layers of American history.
Alas, it's the 1960s, and Boston is changing fast. The speaker's beloved South Boston Aquarium is a boarded-up wreck now; even the jaunty "bronze weathervane cod" atop the building has "lost half its scales." The lovely old heart of the city is being grubbed up to build more and more "parking spaces" and "garage[s]," making way for "giant finned cars." The Statehouse and the bronze monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Infantry Regiment (which the speaker spends long passages contemplating) have to be propped up with planks and scaffolding to keep them from falling to pieces in the uproar of construction.
A new Boston (and a new America) is being constructed all around the speaker, and the speaker doesn't like it. In contrast with the heroic moral sternness the speaker sees in the statue of Shaw and his regiment, modern America looks shabby, crass, and commercial. Down on "Boylston Street," the speaker even spots a picture of a burning Hiroshima (the Japanese city upon which the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb in World War II) being used to advertise a safe: a perfect, awful image of selfish American money-worship overpowering decency.
Through this gloomy depiction of Boston in the 1960s, Lowell looks askance at the United States he knew, wondering whether Americans can keep a grip on a legacy of morality and justice—or whether it's already far too late for that.
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Literary and Historical Context of “For the Union Dead”
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Literary Context
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was one of the major American poets of the mid-20th century. He was a key figure in the confessional poetry movement, which emerged in the U.S. in the 1950s and '60s.
Confessionalism was deeply personal and often touched on trauma, sexuality, and mental illness. (Lowell in particular was famous for exploring his struggles with depression and mania in his work.) Other famous figures often labeled "confessionalists" include Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (both of whom studied under Lowell at Boston University), as well as Lowell's friend John Berryman. These poets' forthright examination of subjects often kept under wraps was in part a reaction against the stifling conventionality of postwar life in the '50s.
In this particular poem, Lowell casts a gloomy eye over his own time and place, too, lamenting the soulless materialism of the 1960s—especially what he saw as the wanton commercialistic destruction of Boston, the city where he was born and raised.
Lowell counted his friend Elizabeth Bishop and the modernist poet William Carlos Williams among his primary artistic influences. Another important figure was the writer Allen Tate, whose poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" inspired Lowell to write "For the Union Dead" in response. Like Tate's poem, this one interweaves reflections on a historical tragedy with intimate, personal reflections on loss. (Readers might be interested to compare this poem with Natasha Trethewey's "Elegy for the Native Guards," which also responds to Tate.) Lowell published "For the Union Dead" in a 1964 collection of the same name.
Historical Context
This poem alludes to a real-life monument celebrating Colonel Robert Shaw and his 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a notable Civil War regiment formed in 1863. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation (a declaration that all enslaved people in the rebel states were legally free), President Abraham Lincoln exhorted Black men to join the army and fight for the Union cause; as the National Archives puts it, this was an opportunity for the "liberated to become liberators." The troops under Shaw's command were Black volunteers responding to that call, many of whom joined up under the encouragement of abolitionist leaders.
The 54th Regiment became famous both as one of the first Black regiments in the U.S. and as a skilled band of soldiers. Unfortunately, it became most famous of all for a battle in which it suffered terrible losses: an unsuccessful but brave assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate fort in South Carolina. Hundreds of men (Shaw included) died in the attack; the regiment suffered more than 40 percent casualties that day.
As Lowell describes in this poem, the victorious Confederate soldiers sent a sneering message to Union leaders, referring to the men of the regiment with a racial slur and informing Shaw's family that all the dead men had been buried unceremoniously in a mass grave. Shaw's parents replied that there was "no holier place" he could be buried than among "brave and devoted soldiers."
Though they lost the literal battle, the 54th Regiment won an important symbolic victory that day, providing a stirring example of Black heroism that inspired many more soldiers to join the Union cause. Some stories from the battle—like that of Sgt. William Carney, who rescued the Union flag after its original bearer died and proudly reported to his fellow soldiers that "the old flag never touched the ground"—became almost legendary. (For his heroism, Carney became the first Black person to receive the Medal of Honor.) The monument on Boston Common celebrating the Regiment reflects how big a mark the battle of Fort Wagner left on the national psyche.
When Lowell published this poem about a century later, the wounds of the Civil War still ran deep in the United States. The country was struggling through the civil rights movement, in which Black people and their allies fought for equal treatment and desegregation. A significant proportion of white America pushed back, often in horrendously violent ways. Lowell's allusion to the "drained faces of Negro school-children" in the news might evoke, for just one example, the Ku Klux Klan's murder of four Black children (Addie Mae Collins, Carol McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley) in a 1963 church bombing.
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More “For the Union Dead” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Lowell himself reading the poem aloud.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Lowell's life and work.
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An Interview with Lowell — Watch an interview in which Lowell discusses poetry with fellow poet Richard Wilbur.
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Lowell's Legacy — Read an article honoring Lowell's 100th birthday and discussing his continuing influence.
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The 54th Regiment — Learn more about the soldiers depicted in the memorial the poem describes.
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Lowell's Struggles — Read a New Yorker article that describes Lowell's wild and difficult life.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Lowell
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