For the Union Dead (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: Robert Lowell
  • First Published: 1960
  • Type of Work: Lyric Poetry
  • Genres: Poetry
  • Subjects: African Americans

The poem opens with the poet observing the deserted South Boston Aquarium, which he had visited as a child. The ruined building is symbolic both of his lost childhoood and of the decay of Boston, undergoing massive urban renewal, which disturbs such landmarks as the Statehouse and the statue of Colonel Shaw.

The statue causes the poet to think of Shaw, an abolitionist’s son and leader of the first black regiment in the Civil War. Shaw died in the war, and his statue is a monument to the heroic ideals of New England life, which are jeopardized in the present just as the statue itself is shaken by urban renewal.

Images of black children entering segregated schools reveal how the ideals for which Shaw and his men died were neglected after the Civil War. The poem’s final stanzas return to the aquarium. The poet pictures Shaw riding on a fish’s air bubble, breaking free to the surface, but in fact, the aquarium is abandoned and the only fish are fin-tailed cars.

This poem is a brilliant example of Lowell’s ability to link private turmoil to public disturbances. The loss of childhood in the early section of the poem expands to the loss of America’s early ideals, and both are brought together in the last lines to give the poem a public and private intensity.

The poem is organized into unrhymed quatrains of uneven length, allowing a measure of flexibility within a formal structure. This style reflects the poem’s combination of private and public concerns and gives substance to the poem’s ideas.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Comments on movement between past and present; explores the poems as a sequence. Offers valuable contexts for title poem.

Fein, Richard J. Robert Lowell. 2d ed. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Surveys poems and remarks on animal imagery. Close reading of title poem.

Mazzaro, Jerome. The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965. Reflects on solipsism and narcissism in the poems; Lowell often slips into self-pity.

Rudman, Mark. Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Argues that the poems “progressively” darken, that the subject of the book is “pain.”

Yenser, Stephen. Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Finds Lowell’s poems sometimes “excruciatingly introspective.” Comments on most of the poems.