ENGL130
Professor Rhodes
25 March 2010
“For the Union Dead”: A Social Criticism “For the Union Dead” is a socially critical poem that fills the page with destructive and stark imagery throughout. Such imagery is central to the poem and is also central to interpreting the poem in the manner in which Robert Lowell intended. Lowell was an American poet who expressed his concern for the direction of American society though his poetry: “For the Union Dead” is a prime example of that concern. In “For the Union Dead”, Robert Lowell condemns American society for the direction in which it is heading, away from the “old South Boston Aquarium” (Line 2) of old and towards a society predicated on glamorizing “commercial photograph[s] / [showing] Hiroshima boiling / over a Molser Safe” (55-57): commercial gain at the cost of morality. Lowell opens the poem with a description of a childhood pastime of his, “the old South Boston Aquarium”, as it stands today, followed by a description of the way things used to be when he was growing up. Lowell writes, “Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; / my hands tingled / to burst the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish” (5-8). The imagery here suggests Lowell’s anxiousness to be as close as physically possible to the fish as he pretends to pop the bubbles emitted from each of them. In other words, by describing the fish as “cowed, compliant”, Lowell is setting up imagery of a power relationship from very early on in the poem.
The image to follow that of Lowell as a child in the aquarium is an image of Lowell in the very same face-pressing position, only this time as an adult. “One morning last March, / I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized / fence on the Boston Common” (11-13), almost as if to tell the reader to bring the same judgments as they have made from the kid popping the bubbles at