In 1969 Robert Lowell drafted a statement on his poem "For the Union Dead" to be included in an anthology edited by Whit Burnett and entitled This is My Best. Each poet was to select the most outstanding poem from his or her own work and then explain that choice. Though Lowell hedged on declaring "For the Union Dead" his best poem, in choosing it for the collection he confirmed what many of his readers had felt, that if not his "best," this was certainly one of his most attractive, compelling, and characteristic poems.

Lowell's statement touches on the composition and the thematic center of the poem. Those who have not read his account of its origins may find his assessment surprising. As originally drafted, Lowell's remarks read as follows:

If I knew my best poem, I think I would be too elated to reveal the secret; like some powerful chemical formula, this knowledge should be guarded and sipped by stealth. Anyway, I have no idea. Each poem was meant to be alive and new, and many were once ambitious. I chose "For the Union Dead" partly because of its length, neither overmodest nor hoggishly long for this collection. All one winter, I cut, added and tinkered. Some of my better lines came to me a few days before I read the poem at the Boston Public Garden Festival

         He rejoices in man's lovely,
         peculiar power to choose life and die.

I have written nothing else for an occasion, and feel no desire to try again. The demands helped and even encouraged me to try to pull three incoherent sketches together. One was about an aquarium, one about a parking lot, one about a Boston club. I do not regard ambitious interpretations of his own poems as one of the poet's most useful chores. I wished to give my own structure to the free verse I had learned from my friend, William Carlos Williams. My poem may be about a child maturing into courage and terror. My lines are on the dry and angry side, but the fish and steam-shovels are Tahitian. In 1959 I had a message. Since then the blacks have perhaps found their "break," but the landscape remains.

Within this statement, I have suspected, lie subtle directions for those seeking to interpret "For the Union Dead." It is my intent, then, briefly to trace the process by which Lowell pulled his "incoherent sketches together" and combined them with the Ur-poem called "One Gallant Rush" to create "Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th," now entitled "For the Union Dead." I will also consider the implications of Lowell's ingenuous suggestion that his poem "may be about a child maturing into courage and terror," which implies that the finished poem "For the Union Dead" centers not in its public language of history and heroism, as most critics would have it, but in its tropes of memory and psychological alienation. Lowell wrote (or, perhaps more accurately, completed) his poetic performance to be delivered at the Boston Arts Festival of 1960. This annual event, for many years held every June in the Public Garden, featured paintings and sculpture displayed among the plantings and a reading by a prominent poet. The year that Lowell read his poem, Boston Common, directly across Charles Street, had been partially dug up for construction of a massive underground parking garage. Because of the scale of the excavations, the State House and the Shaw Memorial, two hundred yards up the slope of Beacon Hill, required substantial bracing to stabilize them against vibrations, as Lowell notes in his completed poem. Yellow power shovels and other heavy equipment, idled for the evening, stood in full view of the reading site.

Lowell recognized the dangers of writing occasional poetry, and, consciously resisting conventional pitfalls, he cast his autobiographical-psychological study of historical self-presence (that is, a poem that places the self at the center of history) within the framework of a Horatian ode. He thereby makes room for his own revisionary approach to modernism, which abandons Eliot's doctrine of impersonality and restores a Wordsworthian faith in the signature of individual experience.

"The Old Aquarium"

Lowell's "incoherent sketches" are drafts of two separate poems, one about the old South Boston Aquarium and the other about Colonel Shaw. The parking lot sketch and the Boston club sketch in surviving drafts have already been incorporated into "The Old Aquarium," the five draft pages of which illustrate Lowell's attempt to combine the strongest elements of one half-finished sketch with the other. "The Old Aquarium" opens, "Remember how your nose crawled like a snail on the glass, / your hand, a child's, tingled / with careless confidence." A penciled "my" over the first "your" indicates that even at this early stage Lowell was making the decision to filter experience through a first-person speaker.

The fourth stanza of the draft contains the remainder of the otherwise lost sketch about the Boston club:

     The curator, once the city's foremost citizen,
     the pillar and sustainer of its symphony,
     stands, a judge and beggar, in the doorway. His white scar,
     a trophy of the Civil War, is like a jawbone.

The subject of the portrait is Henry Lee Higginson, Civil War veteran and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who had died when Lowell was two years old. Perhaps in the original Boston club sketch Higginson had been portrayed with more historic verisimilitude, but identifying him as the "curator" of the aquarium is, of course, an act of fancy, irony, and satire. While in this draft-poem Lowell's purpose in conflating the imaginary and the real is unclear, Higginson's historical presence will serve to facilitate Lowell's imaginative leap when, some drafts hence, he brings together the aquarium and the Shaw Memorial as civic monuments of dissimilar public status but comparable personal significance.

Certainly Higginson was the archetypal old Boston club member, a partner in Lee, Higginson, and Co., investment bankers, and a wealthy benefactor of schools and cultural institutions. The "club" to which Higginson belonged is no particular institution but rather that class of powerful and well-educated men who once ran the city of Boston but who, by the time he died, were losing control to Irish and Italian politicians. Lowell seems to imagine Higginson in reduced circumstances, as "curator" of a broken-down, snow-shrouded aquarium, ironic emblem of cultural and educational institutions now bereft of their purpose and dignity. But Higginson retains his sense of self:

     Blunt humor and blunt severity
     altemately puff from his chewed cigar;/bitten
     his exquisite, taut face,
     a grayhound's, trembles with robustness.

In spite of his longing for the antebellum world, he seems to understand that its utopian qualities have flourished only in his own mind:

     "No one I've ever met," he sighs,
     even remembers the code duello,
     man's peculiar and lovely power
     to deny what is and die."

Here Higginson, the Civil War survivor, offers a romantic view of combat that Lowell would later apply to Colonel Shaw. Higginson, a friend of Shaw's, was a member of the Massachusetts Second Regiment, Shaw's second military unit and the first in which he served as an officer. Although Lowell proceeded no further with "The Old Aquarium" (subsequent drafts comprise his efforts to merge it with "One Gallant Rush"), he already had hit upon one of the essential strategies of his finished poem: to bridge the gap between the historically distant, heroic self-sacrifice of Colonel Shaw and the human degradation of an unheroic present through the medium of individual perception and memory. Higginson, who survived into the new century, embodies the Civil War experience and draws it closer to our own time. As such, he serves as a transition between the long-lost personal experience of Shaw and that of the contemporary, first-person speaker, who views Shaw only as a historical figure.

"One Gallant Rush"

In rhetorical terms, Lowell, in "One Gallant Rush," overlays a meditative lyric on the structure of a historical narrative. The earliest draft so called derives several of its phrases and scenes from Luis F. Emilio's A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (1891), and the title is almost certainly drawn from Frederick Douglass's famous words, "The iron gate of our prison stands half open, one gallant rush … will fling it wide."

The draft begins as a critique of modern war: "Fort Wagner uselessly cannonaded all day / like the French English and German trenches." As in Henry V, the pageantry of the battlefield almost conceals the futility of armed conflict:

      and you on the far right of your negros,
      sword out, now ankle deep, now knee deep,
      as the waves slapped the sand,
      the white flag of Massachusetts in front,
      the national flag to the rear.

But pageantry isn't combat, and once the gunfire breaks out, Shaw's sense of predestination, as Lowell imagines it, prepares him for his fate, perhaps even causes it. The syntax propelling the Colonel to his death relies on infinitives, which suggest a continuing expectancy. The event itself concludes so abruptly that the poem, failing to catch the moment, simply notes that it is "all over."

     The … cannon and muskets,
     your men holding their fire,
     everywhere dropping,
     then the moment it was all about,
     the moment you'd been expecting,
     three days, perhaps all winter since
     you took the command,
     at last the instant, powder-lit,
     sword in hand, crouched like a cat—
     all over.

The poem's argument, insofar as it makes one, is, of course, the rather well-worn observation that war is hell, modern war somewhat more hellish than those of earlier days. The black soldiers who stormed Fort Wagner have no role in this pageant-poem other than to hold their fire and die. On a separate page, however, probably written as an afterthought to the first draft, Lowell begins to complicate his poem. He had adhered too closely to his single source. He needed to multiply the dimensions of his poem so that it would spring to life. He would do so by extending his concerns into his own century.

The first lines of the fragment undercut the futility the first draft projects by presenting Shaw's death as a moment that somehow transcends momentariness:

    Because that fine moment ended abruptly,
    it never ended.
    It shines on distinct like a target.
    Or is it a loaded and leveled gun?

The question links the historical figure with contemporary black civil rights leaders; nonetheless, Lowell argues, Shaw is "to[o] perfect for the moment" to be of use in the present struggle, for his willingness to sacrifice, his embrace of the heroic imperative, involved not only himself but the black soldiers he led. Shaw is thus a pivotal figure, his military-heroic values rooted in the past, his democratic sympathies, though grounded in the New England aristocrat's natural sense of leadership, expanding to encompass a grander ideal of human equality.

Finding the proper symbolic framework to embody the complexities of Shaw's relationship with the contemporary world would eventually require Lowell to privilege the meditative, first-person speaker and to wind the plot of the poem through the speaker's associations. It is central to Lowell's aesthetic that the most profound links with history are revealed by means of an associative process so personal that it can only be justified by acknowledging the peculiarities of individual perception.

But before making that important leap in the composition process, Lowell again reworked his straightforward historical sketch in yet another draft of "One Gallant Rush." Focusing on Shaw's experience, it suggests that blacks and whites have been so divided since the Civil War that Shaw's personal qualities are irrelevant to the contemporary civil rights movement. Too much a product of the war and of heroic idealism, Shaw exists, in a sense, only because he chose not to. If he had lived, he would have gone "on like a Strulbug," in a state of death-in-life.

Finding a bronze immortality ill suited to his purposes, Lowell marshalls some historic anecdotes to soften the effect. The martyr is addressed: "you shaved your beard / and mustache and passed for a girl at the ball" (the incident is apparently true), and "at your mother's nagging you packed / the colonels uniform you wouldn't wear at your wedding." Drawing upon such domestic details helps humanize Shaw, and it permits Lowell to begin imagining a larger but more personal context in which the figure of Shaw is subsumed, but not lost, in a more contemporary meditation.

The rest of this draft concentrates on the heroic act itself. Calling the Civil War "the first modern war" (a historical truism, although some historians give the Crimean War precedence), Lowell resorts to desultory melodramatics of a sort he would never have allowed himself to publish:

     your general, soon mortally wounded,
     on his great bay charger, saying:
     "I am a Massachusetts man myself,"
     then turning and asking,
     "if the flag-bearer fall,
     who will carry the fla[g]?"
     And you tense and watchful,
     affable, easy in your movements,
     parsimonious in speech, saying:
     "I will."

Clearly this melodramatic language (taken word for word from Emilio's book) wouldn't do. Lowell realized he had to find a way to link the past to the present, to follow the line of development suggested in his opening stanza. He would look no further than his last work to find his strategy.

In Life Studies, published shortly before he began working on "One Gallant Rush," Lowell had committed himself to a personal, autobiographical aesthetic. While such an aesthetic functions naturally in poems about one's family life and childhood—and even about one's stay in a mental hospital—"For the Union Dead" would significantly extend the range of the approach beyond the personal, even beyond perceivable space and time, into shared history.

In the next, fragmentary draft of "One Gallant Rush," Lowell introduced some poignant domestic lines about his daughter's guinea pigs. Although incorporated in a full-length draft of "For the Union Dead," the passage was eventually dropped, only to find its way into "Fourth of July in Maine" three or four years later. The lines were probably intended to provide a meditative setting and therefore fulfill the same function as the childhood and present-tense landscapes of aquarium and Boston Common in the finished poem:

    Always this itch for the far away,
    the excessive, the decadent!
    Even on this dead June afternoon,
    when the air has stopped still,
    and my daughter has just brought home
    a baby guinea pig and its mother from school
    to board with us till fall,
    I dream of some flash of powder or whiff of
    grapeshot
    to destroy the chaff of day.

Lowell would have quickly seen the awkwardness of allowing two guinea pigs to trigger a meditation on war, but the draft justifies the connection by means of an analogy between Shaw's childhood and Lowell's, Harriet being the intermediary. As a boy Shaw had altogether too much in common with the inhabitants of the twentieth century to excite our envy or admiration, Lowell argues, so we can be "grateful" that in his subsequent martyrdom he "managed to supersede / those fond, early out of key anecdotes."

The anecdote, cited by Lowell and recounted in detail by Peter Burchard, refers to Shaw's ballroom cross-dressing. Though probably a typical jest of the period, it is hardly the sort of story we expect to hear about a Civil War hero, since it calls into question the rigidly conventional, nineteenth-century ideal of manhood. In war, whatever its social or political justifications, men distinguish themselves by demonstrating courage and military prowess. How could a boy amused by an activity that implicitly rejects the phallic power and privilege of manhood have become, only six or seven years later, a martyr to the cause of abolition and the republic? And Shaw was, it seems, still young enough to be "nagged" by his "abolitionist mother / into packing the colonel's uniform [he] wouldn't wear to [his] wedding."

The problem with "One Gallant Rush" was that it failed, despite Lowell's tinkering, to bridge the historical gap between the narrator and his subject. For Lowell, naked historicism was unacceptable; only through its personal dimensions could the intellectual experience of history be authenticated and only through the language of the senses could it be adequately conveyed. The attempt autobiographically to place "One Gallant Rush" on a "dead June afternoon" didn't work. But combining it with the aquarium sketch would locate it within a landscape of loss and destruction, one more richly endowed with personal memory-images and public sociopolitical dimensions.

From "The Old Aquarium" to "Colonel Shaw and his Men"

Reworking passages from the aquarium sketch and combining them with passages from "One Gallant Rush," Lowell began to fashion his poem into the four-line free verse stanzas of the finished version. Almost immediately, the opening lines take shape:

      The old South Boston aquarium stands
      in a sahara of snow now. The broken windows are boarded,
      the bronze weathervane carp has lost half its scales,
      the seedy tanks are dry.
 
      Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass,
      my hand, a child's, tingled
      with careless confidence to burst
      the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed,
      compliant fish.

Establishing the essential rhythm in these two stanzas was Lowell's most important single step toward completing the poem. "One Gallant Rush" was dogged and flat-footed in its cadence; the new stanzas provided a far more effective rhythmic template which subsequent stanzas could follow or play upon.

Another central concern was to position the speaker in relation to his material, and here Lowell still has some problems. The two subsequent stanzas, which deal with Shaw (and mention for the first time the "bell-cheeked negro infantry"), both begin with "Later," as Lowell hesitates to bring his childhood self and his contemporary persona into conjunction. "Once" places the child comfortably in the past, but only in the next draft would Lowell devise the stanza that relinquishes his childhood and valorizes the role of the Shaw Memorial in linking historical past, memory, and the present:

     The Aquarium is gone. Here in the heart of
     Boston
     the Shaw Civil War Memorial
     still immortalizes the immortal moment,
     and stick[s] like a fishbone in the City's throat.

Extending this draft generated new problems but also fresh images that would survive in the finished poem, images like the "bell-cheeked negro infantry" and the memorial as a hook, later a fishhook, finally a fishbone in the throat of the city. A version of lines that would eventually conclude the poem—

     giant finned cars nose on like fish,
     a savage servility slides by on grease

—appears at this stage, but in subsequent drafts Lowell would bury them in the middle of the poem.

Lowell now embarks on five successive complete drafts, the first two entitled "Robert Shaw and his Men" and "Colonel Shaw and his Negro Regiment," the rest "Colonel Shaw and the 54th," the title under which the poem would appear in the first paperback edition of Life Studies. These drafts all contain the essential tensions of the finished poem, the historical conversation between past and present, the violence of modern life and the dignity of Shaw's enterprise, the ironic awareness that Shaw's battle remains unconcluded. Not until the fifth complete draft, however, would Lowell finally end his poem.

Driving the giant finned cars to the rear of the poem, Lowell refuses any hint of resolution and leaves the reader with an image of sharks schooling, as if they had grown from the modest little fish the child once observed in the South Boston Aquarium. It is because of this ending that Lowell could argue successfully that his poem is about that child's maturation; the poem is about the maturation of a point of view, a widening of observation from a child's wonderment at the contained natural world to a critically informed understanding of the relationship between history and the present. Moving to giant finned cars from cowed, compliant fish completes the trope of observation and maturation that opens the poem.

Before he settled on an adequate conclusion to what had become a slightly unwieldy poem, Lowell made several attempts to close with his historical material rather than with the present:

     Unable to bend his back, he leads
     his men to death, and seems to wince
     at pleasure, suffocate to be alone.
     They all died for the Republic.
     [Complete draft #1]
     ..........................................
     A gay, droll gentleman—he) had no leisure (to distrust
     (nature at ease,) the resolute disorder
     of his bronze, bell-cheeked negro infantry,
     their eternal lubberly slogging past the Statehouse steps.
     [Complete draft #3]

Besides generating (or rediscovering) the eventual ending, Lowell's five drafts produce another essential image—that of the Mosler safe and the atomic explosion at Hiroshima. This key image of modern warfare provides the historical balance against which to weigh the individual heroism of Shaw and his troops and with which to return to the present. With the other key image, also found in these drafts, of the speaker's hand drawing back not from cowed fish but from "negro school children" seen on television (who, too, are cowed like the fish), the poem is largely complete, though many penciled notations on the final draft indicate further polishing. This last of the Houghton drafts still differs enough from the published version of the poem to warrant reproduction here, with the kind permission of the Lowell Estate and of Houghton Library. I make no attempt to correct the spelling nor to take into account the marginal notations, some of which will be incorporated into the finished poem:

     COLONEL SHAW AND THE MASSACHUSETTS' 54TH
 
     Relinquunt omnia servare rem publicam
 
     The old South Boston Aquarium stands
     in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
     The black 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 now. I often sigh
     for the dark, downward and vegetative 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 dyosaur steamshovels were grunting
     as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
     to build the mammoth parking lot.
 
     Everywhere, the purr of commercial optimism
     rises to the clang of desecration. Orange,
     Thanksgiving-colored pumpkin-colored girders
     brace the tingling Statehouse.
 
     A steel frame reinforced
     Colonel Shaw
     and his bell-cheeked negro infantry
     on St. Gaudens' Civil War relief …
 
     The monument sticks like a fishbone
     in the City's throat;
     its Colonel is as lean
     as a compass-needle.
 
     He has an angry wrenlike vigilence,
     a greyhound's gentle tautness;
     he seems to wince at pleasure,
     and suffocate for privacy.
 
     When he leads his negro volunteers to death,
     he cannot bend his back—
     he is rejoicing in man's lovely,
     peculiar power to deny what is and die.
 
     Outside Boston,
     the old white churches hold their air
     of sparse, sincere rebellion; transparant flags quilt
     the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic;
 
     it[s] ramrod-witted stone Union Soldiers
     grow slimmer and younger each year—
     wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets,
     and muse through their sideburns.
 
     Here in this city, a girdle of girder;
     the terminus of turnpikes,
     there are no bronze monuments for the last war.
     A felt, authentic commercial photograph
 
     of Hiroshima rising like a cloud
     above an American safe that survived the blast
     says no thief
     will break into our treasure.
 
     The aquarium is gone. My hand draws back.
     When I crouch to my television set,
     the terrorized faces of negro schoolchildren
     flash like bubbles on the screen.
 
     Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble,
     he waits for the blessed break.
 
     Everywhere,
     giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
     a savage servility
     slides by on grease.

Before publishing the poem Lowell added two lines to the penultimate stanza, revised the stanza about the stone Union soldiers to give them a little more dignity, eliminated "terminus of turnpikes," changed the "mammoth parking lot" to an "underworld garage," replaced "commercial optimism" with "parking spaces" that "luxuriate like civic / sand piles," eliminated the awkward lines "says no thief / will break into our treasure," and generally rendered the poem more euphonious and rhythmically satisfying.

At the Boston Arts Festival Lowell would say (reading a prepared statement), "My poem, 'The Union Dead,' is about childhood memories, the evisceration of our modern cities, civil rights, nuclear warfare and more particularly Colonel Robert Shaw and his negro regiment, the Massachusetts 54th. I brought in early personal memories because I wanted to avoid the fixed, brazen tone of the set-piece and official ode." Later, in drafting his statement for the Burnett anthology, Lowell would recognize how deeply personal he had made his poem, how far from the "official ode" it is. In examining these drafts we can see how consistently the poem moves from wooden impersonality toward a more vivid, more openly autobiographical moment, a progress consistent with Lowell's strengths as a lyric and meditative poet. History and autobiography mingle deeply and subtly in Lowell's creative process, and perhaps we can now more fully understand that when later he wrote, "the age burns in me," he spoke not as a megalomaniac but as an artist whose very personality plumbed the vagaries of history and the contemporary American social scene.