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For the Union Dead. By Robert Lowell. 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.
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.
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.
‘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.
Two months after marching through Boston, half 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.
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.
For the Union Dead. 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.
