Answer:
Like so many modern poems, For the Union Dead resists conventional summary, yet it can be helpful to clearly lay out the sequence of images and ideas within a poem before digging into an analysis. The poem's narrator begins at the ruins of the South Boston Aquarium, evoking past memories, then shifts to near-present, a day 'last March.' Attention turns to a fenced excavation for an underground parking garage within Boston Common--adding to numerous such paved parking areas in central Boston, it seems. Construction supports frame the 'tingling' Statehouse in steel girders, while tremors from the work also shakes the Shaw Memorial, reinforced only by a wooden 'plank.' The narrator reflects on the Memorial, which commemorates Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Union's first black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th. The figures in the sculpture seem to 'breathe' life, issuing a vivid, personal, and disturbing reminder of death and sacrifice: over half the regiment was killed in the first two months of combat. The Memorial hits home in a visceral way that contrasts sharply with its counterparts in 'small-town . . . greens' throughout New England, that seem 'sparse' and sleepy by comparison. The poem reminds/informs the reader that Colonel Shaw, the white commander, was buried in a mass grave, 'a ditch,' along with his black soldiers. This was all the monument Shaw's father wanted. Nor are there more recent war memorials in Boston Common; the closest thing being a photograph celebrating an American-made safe that 'survived' Hiroshima intact. As the poem concludes, the content opens up in ways that challenge the reader and complicate interpretation. It transitions abruptly into current events as viewed on TV, marked by 'the drained faces of Negro school children', then reconnects with Colonel Shaw through images of balloons and bubbles, anticipating an impending rupture. In the final stanza, the poem references the closed aquarium once more, implying that the fish that once fascinated the poem's narrator have been replaced by the 'giant finned cars' that appear 'everywhere', leaving the reader to consider the various implications.
Step-by-step explanation: