For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell

First published: 1960; collected in For the Union Dead, 1964

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Born to a prominent New England family noted for its contributions to American literature, Robert Lowell blends personal and cultural histories in his work. By the time the thirty-five poems of For the Union Dead appeared, Lowell was at the height of his powers, having won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Lord Weary’s Castle in 1947 and the National Book Award for Life Studies in 1959. Most readers consider Life Studies, which includes a lengthy prose memoir of his dysfunctional family, to be his best book.

In 1949, Lowell was institutionalized for a nervous breakdown, and he suffered attacks of manic-depressive disorder for the rest of his life. In 1948, he divorced his first wife, novelist Jean Stafford, and the next year he married Elizabeth Hardwick, from whom he was divorced in 1972. “Old Flame,” the second poem in the collection, concerns his first wife; the first poem, “Water,” is a reminiscence of his relationship with the poet Elizabeth Bishop, whom he met in 1946 and who was to remain a lifelong friend.

Lowell is widely recognized as the father of the confessional movement in post–World War II American poetry, having taught both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton while at Boston University in the late 1950s. In general, the confessional poets, many of whom went through psychoanalysis, place themselves, and often their parents, at the center of their work, as Lowell does in “Middle Age,” the third poem in this book, where, at forty-five, he claims to have met his father (who died in 1950) on the “chewed-up streets” of New York and asked him to “forgive me / my injuries, / as I forgive / those I / have injured!” The religious echo is common in Lowell’s poems.

Typically, confessional poets work through pain and anger, even outrage, sometimes appearing self-analytical and harsh in their judgments on themselves, sometimes self-pitying and morbid. The self or ego is so prevalent in Lowell’s poems that when the third person appears, as in “The Mouth of the Hudson,” the reader may accept the third person as an alter ego or another side of Lowell. In that poem, the man is isolated in an industrial wasteland, and he has “trouble with his balance” (both mental and physical). The poem ends with an image referring to “the sulphur-yellow sun / of the unforgivable landscape.” It is a curiosity, if not a symptom, of confessional poetry that the confessions rarely lead to a sense of healing forgiveness.

The title of the opening poem is “Water,” and water is a conventional symbol of life or purification, but the lovers discover at the end that “the water was too cold for us.” In “Eye and Tooth,” which echoes the biblical “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” the myopic poet (Lowell’s vision had been bad since boyhood) sees the cycle of life during a “summer rain” as “a simmer of rot and renewal.” (The sound play between “summer” and “simmer” and the alliterative “r” sounds typify Lowell’s acute ear.) At the end of that poem he declares, “I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.”

One way of looking at For the Union Dead is that the poems show Lowell struggling against the limitations of his own subjectivity, not by rejecting the potential of the inner self, but by forcing the self out of its shell and into contact with the outer world of time and history. In “Fall 1961,” for example, he confronts time, which he portrays as “the orange, bland, ambassadorial / face of the moon / on the grandfather clock.” The talk of nuclear war during that time of the Cuban Missile Crisis created an apocalyptic anxiety, in which the speaker feels like a fish in an aquarium: “I swim like a minnow / behind my studio window.” Similarly, the state seems helpless, like “a diver under a glass bell.” As “Our end drifts nearer, / the moon lifts, / radiant with terror,” so that the symbol of romance is transformed into one of fear. Note Lowell’s rhyming of “drifts” and “lifts” and his slant rhyming of “nearer” with “terror.”

The father who appears in “Fall 1961” is not his own “dinosaur” father of “Middle Age,” but himself: “A father’s no shield / to his child.” Lowell’s daughter was then four years old. In a simile that may reach back to a sermon entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by the eighteenth century Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (himself the subject of a poem later in the book), Lowell writes: “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.” At the conclusion of the poem, as the clock ticks tediously, the speaker retreats to his “one point of rest,” which is an oriole’s nest. He remains unready to face the threatening external world.

The references to fish, dinosaurs, birds, and spiders and to other nonhuman forms of life accumulate throughout this book, sometimes, as with the spiders, identified with humans, and sometimes depicted as victims of what humans are making of the world. In “The Public Garden,” even in its title an effort to reach out from the self and into the world of current realities, the speaker first declares that “all’s alive” as he watches children “crowding home from school at five.” Then he sees that the swanboats are a “jaded flock” and the park is drying up so that “the heads of four stone lions stare/ and suck on empty faucets.” The moon appears again as a perverse symbol, “always a stranger!” At the end the speaker remembers summer but sees people as “drowned in Eden,” and in the closing lines, heavy with alliterative f sounds, he sees no spark of life or inspiration: “The fountain’s failing waters flash around/ the garden. Nothing catches fire.”

Near the center of the collection, however, in the poem entitled “Returning,” even though the speaker sees the outer world as “rather a dead town,” the poem may hold out some promise for reconciliation. The speaker remembers the world’s “former fertility, / how everything came out clearly / in the hour of credulity / and young summer.” Religious overtones in this poem suggest that Lowell is looking back wistfully at his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1940, but the “venerable elm” (the Church, presumably), now sick, “gave too much shelter.”

In “The Drinker,” Lowell, who had a serious drinking problem himself, resorts to the objectifying distance of the third person. The man in the first line is “killing time.” Despite some ugly images (“the cheese wilts in the rat-trap”), the poem closes on a positive note, reversing the initial assertion into a question: “Is he killing time?” Lowell follows with an image of “two cops on horseback” in the April rain checking parking meters, “their oilskins yellow as forsythia.”

The next two poems, in which Lowell reflects on historical personages (the nineteenth century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jonathan Edwards), concern cultural history. In “The Neo-Classical Urn” the speaker compares himself to the turtles that he caught as a boy, but which died in captivity. Lowell may intend the reader to think of English poet John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but if so, the relationship between the poems is ironic, for Keats sees the urn as representative of timelessness and immortality, whereas the turtles die. Lowell’s vision at the end is complex. As a man he can see that turtles have no mind or will; they are “nothings.” When he rubs his head, he describes it as “that turtle shell,” and he breathes in their “dying smell”; that is, he identifies himself with their mortality and with their place in “history,” at least with his personal history.

The following poem, “Caligula,” refers to the tyrannical Roman emperor whose name was the source of Lowell’s nickname from prep school days, Cal. So, in that poem, too, he continues to expand from the confined self into the outer world. “Beyond the Alps,” in fact, opens up both historically and geographically, and the next several poems continue that expansion: “July in Washington,” “Buenos Aires,” “Dropping South: Brazil,” and “Soft Wood” (in which the speaker, in Maine, regards his cousin dying in Washington, DC).

The compelling title poem, which concludes the book, moves from at least two historical vantage points (one personal and the other cultural) to make perhaps the most powerful political statement Lowell had made to date. (A critic of the war in Vietnam, Lowell was much involved with writers’ protests after 1965.) The poem, in quatrains of varying line lengths, begins with Lowell’s memory of himself as a boy at the South Boston Aquarium, now boarded up. Once his “hand tingled / to burst the bubbles” of the “cowed, compliant fish,” but now he draws back and yearns for “the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile.” He emerges from this reverse evolution, however, into the historical present of “one morning last March.”

In the world at hand, he finds that the dinosaurs, in the form of steam shovels, still exist, gouging an “underworld garage.” The “heart of Boston” is being crowded by luxuries in the form of parking spaces, and the Puritan legacy of the “tingling Statehouse” shakes with the “earthquake” caused by the construction. (Several words and images, such as tingled/tingling and bubbles, echo throughout the poem.) Lowell moves from the personal past to the cultural present in the third quatrain, but with the sixth stanza, which introduces the statue of Colonel Robert Shaw and the Forty-Fourth Massachusetts Negro regiment, he moves into the cultural past. (The regiment’s disastrous assault on Fort Wagner in 1863 is dramatized in the 1989 film Glory.)

Lowell examines the impact of the cultural past on the present, which involves the civil rights movement. South Boston was notorious for its racism in the early 1960s. “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat.” Unlike Lowell, the colonel is “out of bounds now,” free of time and change. The heroism of Colonel Shaw is implicit in his choice of “life and death,” which the churches of New England at least appear to commemorate. Shaw’s choice of life and death constitutes the ultimate triumph of free human will.

In the thirteenth quatrain, Lowell says Shaw’s father wanted no such monument. He was content with the “ditch,” or mass grave, in which his son and his men were buried.(Lowell’s mention of the word “niggers” in this stanza should not be ascribed to Shaw’s father, but to racists generally, in 1863 and 1960.) In the last four stanzas, Lowell returns to the present: “The ditch is nearer.” He concludes with a warning against nuclear war and racism, depicting Shaw “riding on his bubble” and waiting for it to pop, and in the last quatrain he indicts the society that he sees as greedy in its desire for luxury cars and insensitive to the value of such an institution as the city aquarium: “The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease.” The phrase “savage servility,” an oxymoron, encapsulates Lowell’s condemnation of a materialistic culture, servile as, for example, a salesman, and savage in its war and racism (which a salesman would also support and participate in).

Out of its own dark turmoil, the troubled self detects a frightening and vicious world given over to greed and violence. It should be no wonder that when such poets move to a political voice, its tones will be apocalyptic.

Bibliography

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