ABSTRACT
Both the title (“For the Union Dead”) and the epigraph (“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam”) of Lowell’s poem lead the reader to expect that the poem will be an elegy with political ramifications. Lowell’s change in the Saint-Gaudens monument’s inscription from the original “Relinquit” (“he leaves”) of the motto of the Society of Cincinnati to the plural “Relinquunt” (“they leave”) appears to make a simple but powerful point: that the black soldiers who enlisted in Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts Regiment were as heroic and self-sacrificing as their leader. In keeping with the structure of loss one might expect from an elegy, the poem indeed begins with a contrast between “now” and “once.” But that contrast is not about the Civil War or about American race relations. It is about fish. The first lost thing in the poem is the old South Boston Aquarium. What do fish have to do with the Union dead?
