What's O'Clock
IN this first posthumous volume of poems, Amy Lowell has left a large proportion of work which will be welcomed with keen delight.The source of this delight can be defined with but little trouble, though if my judgment is right Amy Lowell will appear much less an innovator than it was necessary she should be when the public attention first felt the shock of her vigorous mind and adventurous pen. No doubt the faculties which she has added to the poetic art, or at least greatly stimulated in it, have now been at work long enough to produce better conditions of appreciation. And the sense of her completed life must enhance the ideality of her work, and enable it to be compared with poetic styles which have endured and peopled the ever ideal realm of art with permanent types and examples.
Certainly it is not reflection or an ordered intellectual position which gives her poetry its power. Reflections occur, but they are familiar, and, it must be admitted, desultory. The sonnets to Eleonora Duse, in which reflection would have been proper, where indeed it is necessary, are successful only to a very limited degree. Most of the poems about people are equally limited. They are enlivened with flashes of wit and inventions of fancy which are often full of beauty and deeply pleasing, but seldom do they convey the sense of a genuine dramatic penetration into other lives or an ability to represent them with living strokes, detached from the author. ‘Evelyn Ray’ is largely an exception to this observation, being brilliantly written and dramatic in a high degree. It reaches a reflection at the end which is common, perhaps, but delivered with the force and simplicity of nature and the gusto of originality: —
Certainly it is not reflection or an ordered intellectual position which gives her poetry its power. Reflections occur, but they are familiar, and, it must be admitted, desultory. The sonnets to Eleonora Duse, in which reflection would have been proper, where indeed it is necessary, are successful only to a very limited degree. Most of the poems about people are equally limited. They are enlivened with flashes of wit and inventions of fancy which are often full of beauty and deeply pleasing, but seldom do they convey the sense of a genuine dramatic penetration into other lives or an ability to represent them with living strokes, detached from the author. ‘Evelyn Ray’ is largely an exception to this observation, being brilliantly written and dramatic in a high degree. It reaches a reflection at the end which is common, perhaps, but delivered with the force and simplicity of nature and the gusto of originality: —
For earth to earth is the best we know,
Where the good blind worms push to and fro
Turning us into the seeds which grow.
Where the good blind worms push to and fro
Turning us into the seeds which grow.
The occasional dips into social cynicism or criticism are again far from complete success. ‘In a Powder Closet’ revives the morals of the eighteenth century, perhaps, but lags far behind Addison in drawing a living portrait of its features. The same morals can go with very different faces and temperaments, and I cannot believe that ‘In a Powder Closet’ recalls the eighteenth century in anything but the viciousness of its practices.
And if not in reflection — monumental as was the energy of her mind — neither does the vitality of this book reside in the author’s now familiar contributions to verge-form. Battle has never raged over any but the unrhymed poems, and surely all sense of the occult and anarchistic has departed by now from those.
No, the secret of this volume is a quality of all poetry, from Vedic chants to Tennyson. In reflection and the larger narrative and dramatic offices of the bard, Amy Lowell was far from supreme. Her love of the visible and palpable forms of things was her most distinct poetic possession, and her fancy was inexhaustible in response to the moods and prismatic imaginations which they quickened in her. It is her power of images drawn from fancy, especially images reflecting nature, that has made her a poet. The world of What’s O’Clock is largely a world of gardens, wheat-fields, lilacs, humming birds, the fountain, and the moon. These are materials old enough, but a deep source of the spirit still, and of the beauty which it is the spirit’s office to treasure. It was remarkable, as another poet once said of her, that she maintained to the end this power of fresh images, drawing the bright-limbed creatures of her fancy with ever delicate and living force. It would be difficult to find another who treated nature with the magic that, she sometimes knew. She had her own way, and is likely at its best to prove inimitable in a certain sphere of fancy. I will quote five lines from ‘Lilacs,’ her hymn to New England:—
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.
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.
Keats was a poet of the senses in his images — in a different way, to be sure, with a good deal more immediateness of touch. There is a line in What’s O’Clock in which it is not frivolous to see a direct parallel in cadence and metrical effect with one of Keats’s most famous magical phrases. I leave the reader to find it for himself! THEODORE MORRISON