Answer:
The poem, 'For the Union Dead,' is narrated by a first-person speaker. The poem's narrator starts in the South Boston Aquarium ruins, recalling past experiences before shifting to the near-present, a day 'last March.' The focus shifts to a gated excavation for an underground parking garage inside Boston Common, which seems to be the latest in a long line of asphalt parking spaces in the city's core business district. In steel girders, construction supports to frame the 'tingling' Statehouse, while vibrations from the activity shake the Shaw Memorial, which is solely supported by a wooden "plank."
Step-by-step explanation:
On the Memorial, the narrator muses on Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th, the Union's first black regiment during the American Civil War. More than half of the regiment was killed in the first two months of the war, and the individuals in the sculpture seem to be 'breathing' life. The sculpture is a vivid, intimate, and disturbing reminder of death and sacrifice. Compared to its equivalents in small-town... greens' around New England, which appear sparse and tired in comparison, the Memorial is visceral and emotionally moving in its impact. As the poem points out, Colonel Shaw, the white leader, was buried in a mass grave called a ditch alongside his black men, and the reader is reminded and informed of this fact. This was all that Shaw's father desired for the Memorial. There are no more modern war monuments in Boston Common, with the closest thing to one being an image commemorating an American-made safe that survived Hiroshima intact.
As the poem comes to an end, the content begins to open up in ways that challenge the reader and make interpretation more complicated. This is followed by a sudden shift into present events as they are being shown on television, which is distinguished by "the drained faces of Negro school children," before reconnecting with Colonel Shaw through the imagery of balloons and bubbles, which foreshadow an approaching rupture. With a return to the shuttered aquarium as a final stanza, the poem implies that the fish that formerly captivated the narrator has been replaced by the 'giant finned cars' that have appeared in 'everywhere,' allowing the reader to explore the different implications of this statement.