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A Discussion of Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead"
FOR THE UNION DEAD
In Robert Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" the urban landscape of Boston and two physical features belonging to it, the old South Boston Aquarium and a monument commemorating the valiant action of Colonel Shaw and his "Negro regiment" in the Civil War, form a triad of distinct, albeit closely interconnected, fields of metaphorical reference and association. Together they afford the poem a densely compacted matrix in which individual signifiers - single words and references to objects rather than conventional images and metaphors serve to mutually enhance each other's implicit symbolism and range of association. In its overall effect the poem poses a radical critique of modern urban civilization as epitomized by Boston seen through the eyes of the first-person narrator in Lowell's poem. However, the aspect of the poem which impresses me most does not reside in its brilliant invective against the so-called progress of modern industrial society but rather in its demonstration of the poet's superb control of language and skill in the subtle uses of Irony.
The three domains represented by:
(a) Boston treated as a scene of bustling activity typical of the present age
(b) the monument commemorating the Union dead and
(c) the South Boston Aquarium
These places or things represent three different temporal planes, which are, in their respective order:
(a) the present or modern age
(b) the historical past
(c) the vast time scale of nature, subject to only very gradual change.
Each domain possesses its own distinctive quality. The mark of modernity is frenetic activity attended by a blatant disregard for the negative consequences of modern life. Rapacious urban development is destroying what is left of Boston's central park.
The historical past is presented as a repository of those values on which modern society is nominally based but which this same society has effectively abandoned, values such as those commonly associated with valor and the spirit of self-sacrifice in the service of the very ideals the monument is meant to recall. The monument is the physical expression of a firm belief shared by those who erected it that the values it commemorates are worth preserving and defending. The line in the 14th Stanza "There are no statues for the last war here" suggests that modern society has lost such a conviction. A tense contrast between modernity and the values of past traditions even underlies the formal organization of the poem uniting traditional our-line stanzas and modern free verse.
The aquarium is explicitly mentioned only in the first and last stanzas of the poem, allowing the initial and final references to the aquarium to function like brackets which contain the poem's entire content. This structural effect, in turn, implies that nature and the vast expanse of time in which it exists and develops embrace all human activity, whether on the historical time scale or in the modern age. We must decide whether the poem questions optimistic assumptions about human progress in view of nature's apparent indifference to the human situation.
The aquarium and the monument stand for two domains from which modern society has become isolated, even estranged, nature and history. And it is therefore altogether fitting that both concrete objects evince similarities in the manner the poem describes them. Both display a dismal picture of dereliction and alienation from their original function and purpose. The aquarium no longer holds water and the statue of Colonel Shaw is ignored as a relic of a by-gone age. As the statue becomes virtually synonymous with the old Colonel himself through the poet's use of the Pathetic Fallacy. He is "out of bounds" (stanza 10) An existential affinity shared by the aquarium and the monument is hinted at in the lines "Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat" (8).
We may ascertain further mutually reinforcing parallels between the two objects. The aquarium is boarded up while the relic is propped up by a plank splint. Both aquarium and monument awaken a consciousness of the past in the speaker's mind, or more precisely, two aspects of the past. The former nostalgically recalls the speaker's childhood memory of the aquarium in better days when it actually contained fishes and other forms of aquatic life. The monument prompts him to reflect on events in the historical past. As witnesses of either nature or history, both objects are spurned by present-day Bostoners, indeed modern civilization in General. However, there we find suggestions in the poem that the aquarium and the monument, nature and history, will get their own back some day. The Colonel maintains his "wren-like vigilance" (9) and nature, paradoxically enough, demonstrates its irrepressible powers of self-assertion even in human attempts to suppress it.
The aquarium gains increasing symbolic density through accretions of meaning that are built up as the poem develops. The prime association of the aquarium and fish is affirmed in the first stanza by the reference to the bronze weather vane cod and is expanded in the third by reference to "the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile", thus extending the vista so as to comprehend cold-blooded animal life on land and in the sea. When an extinct species of reptile is referred to in the fourth stanza by the words "yellow dinosaur steam-shovels" a significant widening of associations links prehistoric life with the artefacts of modern technology. An analogous linkage is established between the "vegetating kingdom" of the aquarium and parking spaces which "luxuriate" according to words we find in the fifth stanza. These associations resurge in the final stanza with its description of automobiles: "Everywhere, / giant finned fish nose forward like fish. As by some strange twist of fate the city which has condemned the old South Boston Aquarium to neglect and dilapidation finally succumbs to the fate of being contained by a vast and unseen aquarium formed by nature. Nature's "aquarium also appears to comprehend historical time, to judge from the image of the Colonel rising like a bubble. It transpires therefore that, far from achieving progress, the inventions produced by technology are incapable of freeing mankind from the static realm of nature. Colonel Shaw at least awaits "the
blessed break" in terms of the extended Metaphor of a bubble, though whether his release comes with the attainment of something like Nirvana or an escape from nature's influence remains an open question.
Besides their temporal dimension, the aquarium and the monument have a spatial aspect. When visualized, the aquarium appears as a frame or boxlike structure with evident similarities with other objects described in the poem., the "cage" enclosing Boston's parkland, the Molser safe that is able to survive nuclear explosions and the television set in front of which the speaker obsequiously "crouches". The "drained faces of the Negro school-children" shown on the television screen (another box) appear to "rise like balloons" (15), reminding the reader of the bubbles in the aquarium which the speaker when a child tried to burst. The TV pictures may alsoprompt one to reflect how far the post-Bellum process of emancipation has borne outthe hopes of the Abolitionists of the 1860s.The reference to Hiroshima gives the reader occasion to reflect on the immense rift between modern warfare along with its means of mass anonymous destruction and the Civil War with the scope it gave to individual Heroic action.
Modern society is shown in the poem not only to face physical destruction in a nuclear conflict but death in the more insidious form of mental atrophy and the deadening of emotion. Death in this form seems to be intimated by the commercialphotograph making the detonation of the A-bomb at Hiroshima the proof of an advertised product's robust construction. The words "Rock of Ages" derived from a famous hymn underline how far modern society has become removed from its moral and religious premises.
In contrast to the boxlike shape of the aquarium, the salient feature of the monument is its vertical orientation. In common with the spires of the old white churches beside New England's greens and town-squares which "quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic" (11), the monument protrudes
skywards as though proudly and defiantly. The kinds ofliving creatures directly associated with the monument do not belong to the domain of fishes and reptiles but to airborne or fleet creatures, the wren, the greyhound and the wasp,which convey very unreptilian associations such as those of free flight, vigilance and speed. The emphasis on the linear aspect of the wren's and greyhound's posture imply ideas of moral rectitude and unswerving purpose. The reference to the needle of a compass becomes a metaphor for resolute moral direction. The Colonel's back is unbending both in terms of a physical posture and the soldier's faithful pursuit of moral integrity. By contrast, events which take place at ground level and underground convey associations of baseness and gross materialism. Here is the domain of grunting dinosaur steam-shovels and underground garages. The ditches on a modern construction site, unlike the anonymous graves ofColonel Shaw and his men, are not worthy of having any honor bestowed upon them.
Back then to the question of the poem's underlying attitude. In some ways Lowell's poem anticipates the "green" ideology of the seventies and beyond, though the speaker does evince a commitment to the values of a by-gone century. The poem's evocation of childhood memory might be considered in the light of poetry by Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas. In any even it attests to the optimism that is perhaps inherent in the very act of writing poetry itself, however dismal the subject to which it is addressed. Adorno's prophecy that there would be no poetry after Ausschwitz has not yet seen fulfilment. Indeed, the end of poetry would signal the triumph of totalitarianism and of moral despair.