I like this one, mostly.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a poet of
the so-called "imagist" school (see below).
It seems that I incline to think in imagist terms……
Her poem below is not a masterpiece by
any means. I particularly do not respond with gusto to reversal of subject-verb
order (“…burns the twilight…”)
"March Evening" is a grand description
of the dying down of day.
I love the weathercock’s “…centuried
rust…”
I love “…wrapping the mists round her
withering form, day sinks down…”
I love “…to-morrow travails to birth…”
I didn’t notice until I was reading the
poem for the fourth time that she uses rhyme.
March
Evening
Blue through the window burns the
twilight;
Heavy, through trees, blows the warm south wind.
Glistening, against the chill, gray sky
light,
Wet, black branches are barred and entwined.
Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green
grass plot
Dents into pools where a foot has been.
Puddles lie spilt in the road a mass,
not
Of water, but steel, with its cold, hard sheen.
Faint fades the fire on the hearth, its
embers
Scattering wide at a stronger gust.
Above, the old weathercock groans, but
remembers
Creaking, to turn, in its centuried rust.
Dying, forlorn, in dreary sorrow,
Wrapping the mists round her withering form,
Day sinks down; and in darkness
to-morrow
Travails to birth in the womb of the storm.
“March Evening” was published in
Lowell’s book A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1912).
Imagism:
The imagist movement included English
and American poets in the early 20th century who wrote free verse and were
devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.” As
a strand of modernism, imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound
read and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it “H. D. Imagiste," and
sent it to Harriet Monroe at Poetry
magazine.
The movement sprang from ideas
developed by T. E. Hulme, who as early as 1908 was proposing to
the Poets’ Club in London a mode of poetry based on absolutely accurate
presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the
imagist manifesto: “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always
the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.”
Them’s
words to write poetry by.
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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