Aquarium vs Hiroshima

Reading For The Union Dead, the overriding question I had the whole time, and even after, was: what’s the deal with the Aquarium? I decided to enlist some other critics and found an article called… well, it looks like the article is on my other computer and I can’t find it right now. I’ll re-edit this with the title when I get home.

But anyway – the old Aquarium gave way to the new one (pictured above) in 1969. Lowell published his poem in 1960 and obviously appropriated this image of the old Aquarium being destroyed. This image encapsulates the themes of old vs. new in the poem, as the poet remembers going to the Aquarium as a child, enjoying the “cowed, compliant fish.” Now, however, the old building has been demolished, the tanks have cracked, and, instead of innocuous sea life, cars like sharks perpetrate their savagery in the streets.

This goes alongside the old vs. new theme in the comparison of Shaw’s statue to the photograph of ‘boiling’ Hiroshima. The old war, while obviously horrific and deadly, pales in comparison to this new type of warfare which melts everything except a particularly strong safe, a sad symbol, perhaps, that materialism alone endures.