Saving the State in Lowell's "For the Union Dead"

Abstract

RITICS of Robert Lowell's poem For the Union Dead have been ' able to agree on at least one point: the Latin servare in the epigraph ironically prefigures the word servility in the last stanza. Jerome Mazzaro is among the first to have pointed out the source of the epigraph (a frieze in Boston commemorating Colonel Shaw and his troops) and to explain the ironic tension it creates: From the monument [Lowell] derives the poem's inscription, a modification of the inscription composed by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot-'omnia relinquit servare rem publicam' ('he leaves all to serve the state'). motto prepares one for the ironic ending in which not service but 'servility slides by on grease'.' Vivian Smith has lent emphasis to this interpretation: The sense of service that Shaw represents ('He leaves all to serve the state' as the epigraph says) is in decline. . . . In their own way these last three lines are as fierce a condemnation of society as Lowell has uttered. snarling sibilants are full of contempt-'A savage servility/slides by on grease'contempt for a society which is violent, cringing and servile in front of money values-a completely materialistic, affluent society which no longer understands Colonel Shaw or the values of one who leaves all to serve the state. Service gives way to servility. ...2 Lionel Trilling has pointed out that the epigraph is actually the motto of the Society of the Cincinnati, of which Shaw was a member, rather than a composition by Eliot, but he supports this translation and interpretation of it.3 In fact, virtually every critic of the poem has mentioned and approved this line of analysis.4