This poem seems to be about the dichotomy of the "old ways" versus the "new" and how sometimes the rememberance of the old can get in the way of supposed progress. Throughout the work it talks about the the destruction old buildings to make way for new things such as parking lots. However, what isn't taken down is Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial work . It still stands, almost forgotten, as a mark of the past. It stands as a rememberance of when integration was just starting .

The excavation is "facing Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry." Seeing this during his imagined walk through the area makes him thing of the horror of what the men went through, "Two months after marching through Boston/half the regiment was dead;" after the Battle of Fort Wagner.

One of the more beautiful lines is in which Lowell talks about Shaw's "peculiar power to choose life and die" when he leads the men to death. He didn't choose either "life or death" as the old saying goes, but rather he chose to die, and in this fact he chose to live. He has lived from that point on in the monument and as the figurehead for the Fifty-Fourth. He was one of the few white men who believed in the black man's ability to fight, to be a man. He believed in the blacks' right to fight and die for and under with flag of the United States of America.

It's hard to talk about Shaw without mentioning the fact of his being left buried with the men he died with in a single mass grave. But as most poets and historians have claimed, it wasn't a shameful thing at all. He says "Shaw's father wanted no monument/except the ditch,/where his son's body was thrown/and lost with his 'niggers.'" These were men he died with, and there was no shame in lieing forever with them. "The ditch is nearer" to integration than people were willing to admit or allow for quite a long time.

In the end, Lowell takes a stab at all those people who choose to be "compliant" in the world – just letting things be. He wants the "bubble" to burst and wake people up to the world around them and the wrong in it. Colonel Shaw "rides on his bubble" being one of the first to try to make a change. But it takes a lot to cause the "blessed break" of courageous action.

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

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
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

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.

Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

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