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For the Union Dead. 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. drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still. of the fish and reptile.
- Summary
- Theme and Setting
- Form and Structure
- Literary and Poetic Devices Used
- Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
- Historical Context
- Similar Poetry
‘For the Union Dead’, narrated by a first-person speaker, starts with Lowell’s reminiscence of his childhood memory of the Boston Aquarium. It commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Shaw, a Union officer killed while leading a regiment of black troops during the Civil War. Lowell connects his childhood and a Civil War memorial to contemporary...
‘For the Union Dead’ is a tribute to those who died on the Union side of the Civil War. It further explores the themes of self-sacrifice, self-interest, greed, and idealism by contrasting the past and present. It is set in Boston, near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Lowell’s use of the two main symbolic artifac...
‘For the Union Dead’ is written in free verse with no set rhyme scheme and meter. It consists of seventeen quatrains of varying length. The poem’s structure helps to escape elegiacmonotony which is often created in the poems of reminiscence. In the poem, Lowell’s visit to the park conjures up a series of images from the past and present. Especially...
Literary Devices help to enhance a poem’s meaning or intensify the mood or feeling of the poet and reader. In the poem ‘For the Union Dead’ Lowell uses some devices such as simile, Personification, Alliteration, Allusion, and Enjambmentto create his desired effect.
Stanza One
In the first stanza, the poet introduces the “old South Boston Aquarium” which is closed with everything rotted away. The speaker immediately launches into a memory of a past, paralleling his memory in the Aquarium. He emphasizes the loss and decrepitude through simple words such as “broken” and “boarded,” the weathervane’s scales are “lost,” and the fish tanks are “airy” and “dry. The poet’s choice of adjectives evokes a sense of melancholy with everything ruined and bare.
Stanzas Three and Four
In the second and third stanzas, the speaker recollects his childhood visit to the aquarium. He speaks of his experience of peering into the tanks, his great excitement, as his hand “tingled to burst the bubbles.” These rising bubbles represent the fish as trapped and submissive, “cowed, compliant.” He further elucidates historical regression through the image of “sigh still / for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile.” Indirectly, through this image, he suggests...
Stanzas Five and Six
In these stanzas five and six, the poet speaks of the poem’s central figure: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Particularly, it speaks of a memorial to him by Augustus St. Gaudens. During the Civil War, Colonel Shaw led the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, an all-black squad, and got killed in that. In the following stanza, the poet elaborates on the basic contrastbetween the idealism the soldiers displayed and contemporary society’s struggle to construct more parking spaces. In the line, wher...
‘For the Union Dead’ written in 1964 alludes to various situations in the 1960s. He captures the sense of fear and danger, caused by the possibility of impending nuclear war, and the Civil Rights Movement both were gathering force and momentum. The year after Lowell read the poem on the Boston Common, the Soviet Union and the United States came per...
Lowell’s poems are confessional in nature. For he speaks about the world as he has seen it. Also, he has written about several historical figures and literary persona’s in his poem. Moreover, poems like “Fall 1961” combines his personal and public concerns as he speaks of his fear of nuclear war in them. You can read some of the poems of Lowell to ...
- Female
- March 18, 1991
- Poetry Analyst
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 ...
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For the Union Dead is a book of poems by Robert Lowell that was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1964. It was Lowell's sixth book. Notable poems from the collection include "Beyond the Alps'" (a revised version of the poem that originally appeared in Lowell's book Life Studies), "Water," "The Old Flame," "The Public Garden" and the title poem, which is one of Lowell's best-known poems.
- Robert Lowell
- 1964
- 1964
- Poetry
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.
For the Union Dead, title poem of a collection by Robert Lowell, published in 1964. Lowell originally titled the poem “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th” to commemorate Robert Gould Shaw, a white Bostonian who had commanded a battalion of black Union troops during the American Civil War, and published it in the 1960 edition of Life ...
Lowell ties in the yet unresolved issues of the Civil War with the mindless consumerism that grips the nation in his poem, “For the Union Dead”. One of Lowell’s best-known works, Union Dead is a multi-layered poem set in the heart of Boston. On the surface, it is an elegy to the heroic Massachusetts 54.
