Analysis Of Robert Lowell's For The Union Dead

There’s no doubt that the defining characteristic of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African-American Civil War Regiment, was bravery. Led by Robert Gould Shaw, a white officer, the unit was recognized for the tremendous bravery after launching a ferocious, but unsuccessful, attack upon Fort Wagner. A memorial to Colonel Robert Shaw and the 54th regiment was unveiled in 1897, with the Latin inscription “He leaves everything behind to serve the republic”. However, Robert Lowell, in his poem “For the Union Dead”, would change the inscription from the singular to the plural, “They live everything behind to serve the republic”. Lowell might have done this in order to honor all of those who served in the regiment, not just one particular person. Under the singular inscription, the memorial places

Lowell wrote the poem in 1960, when the Civil Rights movement would start to pick up steam. Lowell writes that, “Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat” (30-31). When the monument was unveiled in 1897, racial issues were prominent but they were not afflicting the city to a heavy degree. The monument served as a reminder to the city of the past service of African-Americans, but it also acted as a “fishbones” for Bostonians because some of them had a hard time accepting African-Americans as their neighbors or accepting the idea of their children going to integrated schools. In fact, by Lowell writing “When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons”, it would foreshadow the busing riots that would occur as the city tried to integrate the schools. The busing riots would force the city to confront its history of racial tension, even though it was a city that prided it’s self as city of opportunity for