Amy Lowell

Hold your soul open for my welcoming. Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me With its clear and rippled coolness, That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest, Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me, That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire, The life and joy of tongues of flame, And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune, I may rouse the blear-eyed world, And pour into it the beauty which you have begotten.

In the brown water, Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine, Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds, A pike dozed. Lost among the shadows of stems He lay unnoticed. Suddenly he flicked his tail, And a green-and-copper brightness Ran under the water.

Out from under the reeds Came the olive-green light, And orange flashed up Through the sun-thickened water. So the fish passed across the pool, Green and copper, A darkness and a gleam, And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank Received it.

If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly I could see to write you a letter.

A LITTLE brown room in a sea of fields. Fields pink as rose-mallows Under a fading rose-mallow sky. Four candles on a tall iron candlestick. Clustered like altar lights. Above, the models of four brown Chinese junks Sailing round the brown walls. Silent and motionless.

The quick cut of a vibrating string. Another, and another. Biting into the silence. Notes pierce, sharper and sharper ; They draw up in a freshness of sound. Higher — higher, to the whiteness of intolerable beauty. They are jagged and clear. Like snow peaks against the sky ; They hurt like air too pure to breathe. Is it catgut and horsehair. Or flesh sawing against the cold blue gates of the sky ?

The brown Chinese junks sail silently round the brown walls. A cricket hurries across the bare floor. The windows are black, for the sun has set. Only the candles. Clustered like altar lamps upon their tall candlestick, Light the violinist as he plays.

I STOOD in my window looking at the double cherry : A great height of white stillness. Underneath a sky the colour of milky grey jade. Suddenly a crow flew between me and the tree — Swooping, falling, in a shadow-black curve — And blotted himself out in the blurred branches of a leafless ash. There he stayed for some time, and I could only distinguish him by his slight moving. Then a wind caught the upper branches of the cherry, And the long, white stems nodded up and down, casually, to me in the window. Nodded — but overhead the grey jade clouds passed slowly, indifferently, toward the sea.

The sudden April heat Stretches itself Under the smooth, leafless branches Of the beech-tree. And lies lightly Upon the great patches Of purple and white crocus With their panting, wide-open cups.

A clear wind Slips through the naked beech boughs. And their shadows scarcely stir. But the pine-trees beyond sigh When it passes over them And presses back their needles, And slides gently down their stems.

It is a languor of pale, south-starting sunlight Come upon a morning unawaked. And holding her drowsing.

The noise of the city sounds below me. It clashes against the houses And rises like smoke through the narrow streets. It polishes the marble fronts of houses. Grating itself against them. And they shine in the lamplight And cast their echoes back upon the asphalt of the streets.

But I hear no sound of your voice. The city is incoherent — trivial. And my brain aches with emptiness.

Before me lies a mass of shapeless days, Unseparated atoms, and I must Sort them apart and live them. Sifted dust Covers the formless heap. Reprieves, delays, There are none, ever. As a monk who prays The sliding beads asunder, so I thrust Each tasteless particle aside, and just Begin again the task which never stays. And I have known a glory of great suns, When days flashed by, pulsing with joy and fire! Drunk bubbled wine in goblets of desire, And felt the whipped blood laughing as it runs! Spilt is that liquor, my too hasty hand Threw down the cup, and did not understand.