And the round notes
flutter and tap about the room,
And hit against each other,
Blurring to
unexpected chords.
It is very beautiful,
With the little flute-notes all about me,
In the darkness.
In the daytime,
The neighbour eats bread and onions with one hand
And copies music with the other.
He is fat and has a bald head,
So I do not look at him,
But run quickly past his window.
There is always the sky to look at,
Or the water in the well!
But when night comes and he plays his flute,
I think of him as a young man,
With gold seals
hanging from his watch,
And a blue coat with silver buttons.
As I lie in my bed
The flute-notes push against my ears and lips,
And I go to sleep, dreaming.
A Lady
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the
perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My
vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its
sparkle may amuse you.
In a Garden
Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And
rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.
Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where
trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.
Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it.
With its gurgling and running.
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.
And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water.
While the moon rode over the garden,
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.
Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!
A Tulip Garden
Guarded within the old red wall's embrace,
Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,
The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the
sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with
crimson lace!
Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,
With
scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of
purple batteries, every gun in place.
Forward they come, with flaunting colours spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our
utmost powers
We hear the wind
stream through a bed of flowers.
[End of original text.]
Notes:
After Hearing a Waltz by Bartok:
Originally: After Hearing a Waltz by Barto/k:
A Blockhead:
"There are non, ever. As a monk who prays"
changed to:
"There are none, ever. As a monk who prays"
A Tale of Starvation:
"And he neither eat nor drank."
changed to:
"And he neither ate nor drank."
The Great Adventure of Max Breuck:
Stanza headings were
originally Roman Numerals.
The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde:
The following names are presented in this etext sans accents:
Margue/rite, Ange/lique, Ve/ronique, Franc,ois.
The following unconnected lines in the etext are presented sans accents:
The factory of Sevres had lent
Strange winge/d dragons
writhe about
And rich
perfume/d smells
A fae"ry moonshine washing pale the crowds
Our eyes will close to undisturbe/d rest.
And terror-winge/d steps. His heart began
On the stripe/d ground
Some books by Amy Lowell:
Poetry:
A Critical Fable
* A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912)
* Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914)
* Men, Women and Ghosts (1916)
Can Grande's Castle (1918)
Pictures of the Floating World (1919)
Legends (1921)
What's O'Clock (1925)
East Wind
Ballads For Sale
(In collaboration with Florence Ayscough)
Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese (1921)
Prose:
John Keats
Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915)
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917)
* Now
available online from Project Gutenberg.
About the author:
From the notes to "The Second Book of Modern Verse" (1919, 1920),
edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.
Lowell, Amy. Born in Brookline, Mass., Feb. 9, 1874.
Educated at private schools. Author of "A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass", 1912;
"Sword Blades and Poppy Seed", 1914; "Men, Women and Ghosts", 1916;
"Can Grande's Castle", 1918; "Pictures of the Floating World", 1919.
Editor of the three
successive collections of "Some Imagist Poets",
1915, '16, and '17, containing the early work of the "Imagist School"
of which Miss Lowell became the leader. This
movement, . . .
originated in England, the idea have been first conceived by a young poet
named T. E. Hulme, but developed and put forth by Ezra Pound
in an article called "Don'ts by an Imagist", which appeared
in `Poetry; A Magazine of Verse'. . . . A small group of poets
gathered about Mr. Pound, experimenting along the
technical lines suggested,
and a cult of "Imagism" was formed, whose first group-expression was in
the little
volume, "Des Imagistes", published in New York in April, 1914.
Miss Lowell did not come
actively into the
movement until after that time,
but once she had entered it, she became its leader, and it was chiefly
through her effort in America that the
movement attained so much prominence
and so influenced the trend of
poetry for the years immediately succeeding.
Miss Lowell many times, in
admirable articles, stated the principles
upon which Imagism is based,
notably in the Preface to "Some Imagist Poets"
and in the Preface to the second
series, in 1916. She also elaborated it
much more fully in her
volume, "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry", 1917,
in the articles pertaining to the work of "H.D." and John Gould Fletcher.
In her own
creative work, however, Miss Lowell did most to establish
the possibilities of the Imagistic idea and of its modes of presentation,
and opened up many interesting avenues of
poetic form. Her
volume,
"Can Grande's Castle", is
devoted to work in the medium
which she styled "Polyphonic Prose" and contains some of her finest work,
particularly "The Bronze Horses".
End