'I grieve for that night'

“Gay Head” (on Martha’s Vineyard, 1860) (engraving), by David Hunter Strother

“Misty Morning, Coast of Maine” by Arthur Parton (1842–1914)

All these years I have remembered a night
When islands ran black into a sea of silk,
A bay and an open roadstead set to a shimmer like cool, white silk
Under an August moon.
Trees lifted themselves softly into the moonlight,
A vine on the balcony glittered with a scattered brilliance,
The roofs of distant houses shone solidly like ice.
Wind passed,
It touched me.
The touch of the wind was cool, impersonal;
The fingers of the wind brushed my face and left me.
I remember that I shivered,
And that the long, continuous sound of the sea beneath the cliff
Seemed the endless breathing of the days I must live through alone.
I grieve for that night as for something wasted.
You are with me now, but that was twenty years ago,
And the future is shortened by many days.
I no longer fear the length of them,
I dread the swiftness of their departure.
But they go — go —
With the thunderous rapidity of a waterfall,
And scarcely can we find a slow, cool night
To consider ourselves,
And the peaceful shining of the moon
Along a silken sea.

— “Grievance,’’ by Brookline, Mass.-based poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

The 'cat prefers the rain to me'

TIME Magazine cover from March 2, 1925 featuring Amy Lowell.

The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house,
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

— “November,’’ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925), very eccentric, cigar-smoking Boston-based Imagist poet

To read how she helped save The Boston Athenaeum, please hit this link. (The article contains the error that she died in 1920.)

The formidable Boston Athenaeum

'In the evening wind'



I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you.
The low moon brightens you with silver.

The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.

“The Weather-Cock Points South, ‘‘ by Boston’s Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

‘Like smoke’

— Photo by Vinc3PaulS

”In the cloud-grey mornings
I heard the herons flying;
And when I came into my garden,
My silken outer-garment
Trailed over withered leaves.
A dried leaf crumbles at a touch,
But I have seen many Autumns
With herons blowing like smoke
Across the sky.’’

— “Hoar-Frost,’’ by Boston’s Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Where the world sailed in

The clipper ship Southern Cross in Boston Harbor in 1851. Painting by FitzHugh Lane.

Meeting-House Square, Boston, in 1895.

“I must be mad, or very tired,
When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track
Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune,
And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square
Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Clear, reticent, superbly final,
With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance,
It dominates the weak trees,
And the shot of its spire
Is cool and candid,
Rising into an unresisting sky.
Strange meeting-house
Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.
I watch the spire sweeping the sky,
I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast
With its royals set full
Straining before a two-reef breeze.
I might be sighting a tea-clipper,
Tacking into the blue bay,
Just back from Canton
With her hold full of green and blue porcelain
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail
Gazing at the white spire
With dull, sea-spent eyes.’’

-- “Meeting-House Hill,’’ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

“Meeting-House Hill’’ is an old section of Boston, from which the poet imagined looking down on clipper ships in the China Trade entering Boston Harbor.

'Like little disks of metal'

"All night our room was outer-walled with rain.
Drops fell and flattened on the tin roof,
And rang like little disks of metal.
Ping!—Ping!—and there was not a pin-point of silence between
    them.
The rain rattled and clashed,
And the slats of the shutters danced and glittered.
But to me the darkness was red-gold and crocus-colored
With your brightness,
And the words you whispered to me
Sprang up and flamed—orange torches against the rain.
Torches against the wall of cool, silver rain!''

-- ''Summer Rain,'' by Amy Lowell

'Rusty and broken'

A street on Boston's Beacon Hill, an epicenter of  Lowell family activities.

"The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house,
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meager shelter of a cellar window. ''

-- "November,''  by Amy Lowell

'Lilac in me because I am New England'

Photo by Ulf Eliasson

Lilacs, 
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac, 
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England. 
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs; 
In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs. 
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; 
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; 
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill. 
You are everywhere. 
You were everywhere. 
You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, 
And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. 
You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, 
You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. 
And her husband an image of pure gold. 
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— 
You, and sandal-wood, and tea, 
Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks
When a ship was in from China. 
You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, 
May is a month for flitting.” 
Until they writhed on their high stools
And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. 
Paradoxical New England clerks, 
Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night, 
So many verses before bed-time, 
Because it was the Bible. 
The dead fed you
Amid the slant stones of graveyards. 
Pale ghosts who planted you
Came in the nighttime
And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems. 
You are of the green sea, 
And of the stone hills which reach a long distance. 
You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, 
You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. 
You cover the blind sides of greenhouses
And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass
To your friends, the grapes, inside. 


Lilacs, 
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac, 
You have forgotten your Eastern origin, 
The veiled women with eyes like panthers, 
The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas. 
Now you are a very decent flower, 
A reticent flower, 
A curiously clear-cut, candid flower, 
Standing beside clean doorways, 
Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles, 
Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight
And a hundred or two sharp blossoms. 
Maine knows you, 
Has for years and years; 
New Hampshire knows you, 
And Massachusetts
And Vermont. 
Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island; 
Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea. 
You are brighter than apples, 
Sweeter than tulips, 
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts, 
You are the smell of all Summers, 
The love of wives and children, 
The recollection of gardens of little children, 
You are State Houses and Charters
And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. 
May is lilac here in New England, 
May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree, 
May is white clouds behind pine-trees
Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. 
May is a green as no other, 
May is much sun through small leaves, 
May is soft earth, 
And apple-blossoms, 
And windows open to a South Wind. 
May is full light wind of lilac
From Canada to Narragansett Bay. 


Lilacs, 
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac. 
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, 
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, 
Lilac in me because I am New England, 
Because my roots are in it, 
Because my leaves are of it, 
Because my flowers are for it, 
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine. 

-- Amy Lowell, "Lilacs''