's "For the Union Dead" is via deconstruction.1. Read the poem aloud.
2. Scan the poem, using a dictionary.
Line 1: u / / / u u / u u / (enjambment) = 10 syllables with 5 stresses
Line 4: u / u / u / (end-stop) = 6 syllables with 3 stresses
Line 7: u / u / u (enjambment) = 5 syllables with 2 stresses
Line 10: u u / / u u / u / u / u (enjambment) = 13 syllables with 5 stresses
Line 13: / u u / u / u u / u / (end-stop) = 11 syllables with 5 stresses
Line 16: u / u / u / u / (end-stop) = 8 syllables with 4 stresses
Line 35: u / u / u / u (end-stop) = 7 syllables with 3 stresses
Line 40: u / u / u / or u / / u u / (end-stop) = 6 syllables with 3 stresses
Line 45: u / / u u u / / / u / u (enjambment) = 12 syllables with 6 stresses
Line 50: u / u / (end-stop) = 4 syllables with 2 stresses
Line 55: u / u / u u / u / u / (enjambment) = 11 syllables with 5 stresses
Line 60: u / / u u / u / / u / u u / (end-stop) = 14 syllables with 7 stresses
Line 65: u u / u u u / / u / (end-stop) = 10 syllables with 4 stresses
Line 68: / / u / (end-stop) = 4 syllables with 3 stresses
Dominant foot: iamb
Number of feet per line: variable
Form: quatrains (unrhymed)
3. Determine the poetic techniques Lowell employs, and use a dictionary
to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words.
Line 1: diction = "South Boston" (setting)
Lines 1-2: dislocation = "Boston" and "Sahara"
oxymorons = "Aquarium" and "Sahara" and "snow"
Line 2: metaphor = "Sahara of snow" (bleakness)
alliteration = "Sahara" and "snow" + "broken" and "boarded" and
"bronze" (line 3)
Line 3: imagery = appeals to sense of sight ("bronze") and touch
("scales")
Line 4: extension of metaphor = "airy" and "dry"
Line 5: personification = "nose crawled"
simile = "like a snail"
Lines 6-7: synecdoche = "my hand tingled / to burst the bubbles" (He, as
a whole, wants to pop the air bubbles.)
Line 7: alliteration = "burst the bubbles"
Line 8: irony = "noses" (Fish breathe through gills.)
irony = "cowed" (Speaker means "coward.")
Cow means to frighten with threats or force.
alliteration = "cowed" and "compliant"
Line 9: metaphor = "My hand draws back." (Literally he stops writing,
but figuratively he is reflecting, and with respect to the figurative
meaning, it is an example of synecdoche.)
pun = "still" ("sighs" to silence, without movement, or up to the
time suggested)
Lines 10-11: allusion to Theodore Roethke who wrote much about the
regression of humanity to its primal state
Line12: imagery = appeals to sense of touch ("barbed") and sight
("galvanized") That is in reverse order with respect to line 3.
Line 13: assonance = "Boston Common"
metaphor = "cage" (a fence)
Line 14: metaphor = "dinosaur" (gigantic and outmoded)
personification = "grunting"
Line 15: personification = "cropped up"
Line 16: metaphor = "underworld garage" (hell, for they are in a "cage"
[line 13])
Line 17: personification = "luxuriate"
Lines 17-18: simile = "like civic / sandpiles" = metaphor (playgrounds
or parks)
Line 18: dead metaphor = "heart of Boston" (downtown)
Line 19: cacophony
alliteration = "girdle" and "girders" + "Puritan-pumpkin"
oxymoron = "Puritan-pumpkin" (Puritans were English
Protestants, and we associate pumpkins with Halloween, a
secular celebration.)
Line 20: personification = "tingling"
Line 21: personification = "shaking" and "faces"
Line 22: cacophony
Line 23: wordplay = "shaking" (repetition)
Line 24: cacophony (reflects "earthquake")
Lines 25-26: historical reference
Line 28: allusion = "William James," the American psychologist and
philosopher, was a founder of pragmatism and the
psychological movement of functionalism.
litotes = "could almost hear" (James was dead at the time of
the dedication.)
alliteration = "bronze" and "breathe"
Line 29: simile = "like a fishbone"
Lines 29-30: metaphor = hard for the city to swallow (accept) Shaw's
idealism
Line 30: personification = "city's throat" = metaphor (internalization)
Lines 31-32: alliteration = "Colonel" and "compass-needle"
simile = "as lean / as a compass-needle"
Line 33: simile = "wrenlike"
Line 34: analogy = the Colonel has "a greyhound's gentle tautness"
Line 35: personification = "wince"
Line 36: personification = "suffocate"
Line 37: pun/irony = "He is out of bounds" (Shaw is, of course, a part of
the monument, but he is no longer under moral obligation.)
irony = "now" (temporal dislocation = contemporary [lines
37-38] and historical [lines 39-40] references)
personification = "rejoices"
Line 38: alliteration = "peculiar power"
oxymoron = "to choose life and die"
Line 39: wordplay = "black" and "death"
Line 40: metaphor = "he cannot bend his back" (moves forward with
rectitude [refer to line 37])
internal rhyme = "black" (line 39) and "back"
Lines 41-42: imagery = appeal to sense of sight: "greens" and "white"
Lines 42-43: dead metaphor = "air / of ... rebellion" (The people in New
England have a rebellious attitude.)
Line 43: metaphor = "sparse, sincere rebellion" (They are against
European tradition.)
alliteration = "frayed flags"
Lines 43-44: irony = "frayed flags / quilt the graveyards of the Grand
Army of the Republic" (The army is not large, noble in
appearance, or of high rank.)
Line 44: alliteration = "graveyards" and "Grand"
Line 45: alliteration = "stone statues"
ambiguity = "abstract" (why?)
Line 46: personification = "grow"
oxymoron = "grow slimmer"
metaphor = idealism of Shaw and his army is fading
Line 47: alliteration = "wasp-wasted"
personification = "doze"
Line 48: personification = "muse"
metonymy and synecdoche = "muse through their sideburns"
(head)
Line 50: metonymy = "ditch" (his son)
Line 53: temporal dislocation
metaphor = "The ditch is nearer." (site of excavation)
Line 54: metaphor = "the last war" (WWII, not an idealistic war)
Line 56: metaphor = "Hiroshima boiling" (atomic bomb)
Line 57: allusion = "Rock of Ages" (Christianity)
Line 58: metaphor = "Space" (heaven)
Line 59: wordplay = "crouch" (speaker moves downward)
Line 60: wordplay = "faces ... rise"
oxymoron = "drained" and "balloons"
simile = "like balloons"
Line 61: proper noun in isolation (refer to lines 37 and 64)
Line 62: pun = "bubble" (a pocket of air in a solid and an illusion)
Line 63: personification = "waits"
Line 64: pun = "break" (physical separation and succumbing spiritually)
Line 66: alliteration = "finned" and "forward" and "fish"
simile = "like fish"
Line 67: oxymoron = "savage servility" (wild or barbaric submissiveness
or servitude)
Lines 67-68: alliteration = "savage servility / slides"
4. Summarize and interpret the poem via deconstructive criticism.
The title of the poem indicates it is for the Union's dead,
suggesting the work honors the soldiers who died in the
American Civil War. However, by 1960, every soldier who had
fought in the Civil War was dead. After initially reading the
poem, a reader may interpret it as speaking for the soldiers, as
voicing their possible disgust at the loss of the aquarium, at the
construction, and at the grease. One may also interpret the title
as meaning, "for the Union, which is now dead." That
multiplicity of meanings is, of course, a feature of deconstructive
analysis.
One point to consider as you interpret the poem is how much the
speaker devotes his stream of consciousness to the Civil War, in
general, and to the soldiers, in particular. Although the speaker
focuses on Shaw, he only mentions his regiment. Is the poem
actually in honor of the soldiers who died in the Civil War? The
speaker celebrates the involvement of the Union's "black
soldiers" (39), but the poem is more about the speaker, who is
mourning the present attitude of Bostonians.
The poem was composed for and read at the Boston Arts
Festival in June 1960. It begins in the present, "now" (2), in
which the "South Boston Aquarium stands / in a Sahara of
snow" (1-2). It ends with the "giant finned cars" (66) moving
"forward like fish" (66) with a "savage servility" (67) that "slides
by on grease" (68). It seems that the poem's true subject appears
in lines 59 and 60, in which the speaker says, "When I crouch to
my television set, / the drained faces of Negro school-children
rise like balloons." That image echoes the earlier images in lines
five through eight, when the speaker remembers himself viewing
"the cowed, compliant fish" (8). He then reveals, "I often sigh
still / for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the
fish and reptile" (9-11). Considering the poem is supposedly
honoring the Union's dead, the description of the aquarium is a
strange place to begin. (Notice the "monument sticks like a
fishbone / in the city's throat" [28-30].)
The connection between the "dark" (10) piscine and African
American worlds may seem strange, but for the speaker, the loss
of the aquarium, the monument, and the current ugliness of
Boston are all relative. The television (society in a figurative
sense) traps the "Negro school-children" (60). They are similar
to the fish and reptiles in the aquarium. Although the Civil War
is over, who is free? We have only a "savage servility" (67).
