Ihere is no denying that Lowell's "study" of his father is not wholly complimentary. A Navy man whose interest in ships is basically academic, whose main connection with Pearl Harbor is that he once bought "white ducks" at the commissary there, and whose way of celebrating giving up naval life for a position with Lever Brothers' Soap is to sing "'Anchors aweigh'" in the bathtub, he is bound to appear somewhat ridiculous. The only time he displays a "seamanlike celerity" is when he leaves the Navy - only to squander a small fortune in the less secure civilian world.

Lowell's nearest approach, in For the Union Dead, to an image of moral political action is to be found in the title poem. As the title suggests, "For the Union Dead" is in some ways a deliberate reply to Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," which revolves around the same two figures, the poet-outsider and the dead hero.

Some of Lowell's poems avoid the rigged rhetoric of "Skunk Hour" by relatively modest ambition, as in "Father's Bedroom"; others make the frustration of the quest for correspondence between self and other part of their theme. And there is at least one justly celebrated poem that takes a third and simpler way: "For the Union Dead."

"The Mouth of the Hudson" is virtually an emblem of the precarious position of man as the persona has come to see him. The poem opens with "A single man," who stands on an outcrop above a railroad siding and watches the trains switching beneath him. . . .

Repeated references to "circles" and the image of "the sulphurous wave" on the Potomac suggest that the American capital is an infernal hub of colonialism whose "stiff spokes" prod at "the sore spots," the underdeveloped and vulnerable nations of the world. The United States seems as incapable of controlling its destiny here as the poet-speaker was of controlling his own destiny earlier; the country's influence expands aimlessly and inexorably, "circle on circle, like rings on a tree."

Now who would be certain the shades of those Union dead were not ready to come on Lowell and Mailer as they strode through the grass up the long flat breast of hill at the base of the Washington Monument and looked down the length of the reflecting pool to Lincoln Memorial perhaps one-half mile away, "then to step off like green Union Army recruits for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers . . ." was what Lowell was to write about events a bit later that day, but although they said hardly a word now, Lowell and Mailer were thinking of the Civil War: it was hard not to.

The poet wryly mocks his activist self, the bespectacled, aging, nervous man of letters playing Union Recruit in his first engagement, not yet sure that Bull Run will be a defeat but vaguely hopeful that defeats may feel more glorious than victories anyway. Washington appears as a post-card version of itself, everything bigger and whiter than life; and the theatrical setting and melodramatized "sci-fi" enemy mock the poet's excitement at doing something "important" and exhilaratingly remote from his usual sense of himself.

An account of the confrontation at the Pentagon between the antiwar protesters and the military the day after [Lowell's reading at an antiwar rally], "The March" . . . describes Lowell's own ambivalence as a participant. The marchers listened to "the remorseless amplified harangues for peace" at the Lincoln Memorial, and then later at the Pentagon, at the end of their march, "heard, alas, more speeches." The political significance of the event lay less in the specific words anyone spoke through a microphone than in the very fact and size of the demonstration.

The variety of diction and tone in this particular poem results not just from a freedom from any one stiff loyalty but more from an even-handedness that, given the circumstances, ought to be authoritative. The first line sets the casualness of his comrades (he once wrote "heaped," but "flung" better insists on the accidental formation of the group) against the biblical measure of the truly devout, those who gather together in God's name; the irony is gentle and only self-deflating.

"Central Park" is delicately framed by a conflict of opposing states of soul in the poet - a vaguely sexual elation ("now light as pollen"), a depressed sense of being used up, mechanized, by the life-process ("now as white / and winded as a grounded kite"). Lowell looks out on a scene of sex-in-nature that might recall the Garden of Eden, but that, to his eye, is as inexorably geometrical as a cubist painting. . . .