For the Union Dead Lyrics
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.52
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 crowded, 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,
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 of 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
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 blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
About
“For the Union Dead” is the title poem in Robert Lowell’s sixth collection of poems, published in 1964 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1964. The poem was written in 1960 for the Boston Arts Festival where Lowell first read it in public. The title references the 1928 poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Lowell’s former teacher and mentor Allen Tate.
The poem’s subject is a public monument in Boston to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw cast by noted American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Shaw, an upper-class Bostonian, lead the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a regiment of African-American soldiers raised for the Union Army from freed blacks and escaped slaves, in the American Civil War. He died, with a large number of his regiment, at the battle for Fort Wagner in South Carolina in July 1863. In the 1960s, the monument, which depicts in bronze relief Colonel Shaw on horseback with the marching column of his regiment, was in disrepair.
Lowell sets the poem in Boston Common, a large public park, where he reminisces how the city has changed since his childhood. The South Boston Aquarium he visited as a child was demolished for a parking lot. He thinks about Shaw and recounts the history of his regiment and the memorial monument, before reflecting on the civil rights movement and school integration protests emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lowell’s poem, reflecting some of his liberal sensibilities, was controversial upon its first reading and publication. Today, “For the Union Dead” is his best known work.
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