Amy Lowell (1874–1925) belonged to a generation of American poets determined to replace moralizing verse with sharp, sensuous images. She became a driving force in the Imagist movement, pushing for free verse and direct treatment of the thing itself. “Streets” is, at first glance, just such a direct image: a city walker, a group of women, a flash of colored cloth. Yet through careful arrangement, Lowell makes that glimpse feel like a small revelation.
The poem emerges from Lowell’s fascination with Japanese aesthetics. Its “Green Houses” recall the pleasure quarters of Edo, where courtesans were at once visible public figures and sequestered women, admired for their layered clothes and hidden linings. Lowell wrote within an early twentieth-century context in which many Western artists were borrowing from Japanese prints: flattened forms, bold color contrasts, and concentration on one vivid detail. Here the city of “eight hundred and eight streets” becomes a maze-like backdrop against which the Women of the Green Houses appear, almost like figures in a woodblock print.
The speaker is not interested in narrative or biography. She notices surfaces: “girdles of spun gold” and long-sleeved dresses “Coloured like the graining of wood.” These comparisons give the women a crafted yet natural beauty. The gold suggests wealth and fragility, while wood grain makes the fabric feel warm and organic. Then the poem pivots on four words: “As they walk.” That single short line turns a still portrait into motion. When the outer hems “flutter open,” the lining shows—“blood-red” and glowing “like sharp-toothed maple leaves / In Autumn.” The muted wood tones hide a fierce inner color, and the red becomes the emotional center of the poem.
Formally, Lowell uses free verse rather than rhyme or regular meter. The opening line is long, enacting wandering through the city. The lines then become short and fragmentary, with periods after “spun gold,” “dresses,” and “wood.” Each image is separated and held for inspection. That rhythm imitates the act of looking: the eye moves, pauses, fixes on a detail. The lack of rhyme does not mean lack of music; the phrases are balanced by repeated sounds such as “girdles of spun gold” and “glow like sharp-toothed maple leaves.” The final word, “Autumn,” carries the weight of the whole image—beauty that is intense and also seasonal, close to falling.
What makes the poem significant is its treatment of beauty in a place society usually judges. Lowell could have written about the Women of the Green Houses as pitiable or scandalous. Instead, the speaker calls them the most beautiful sight in all the city’s streets and lets their clothing reveal a controlled, suddenly radiant natural energy. The “Green Houses” may be named green, but the color that matters is the red inside—seen only by the attentive wanderer who catches the hems opening mid-step. That hiddenness is why the poem still feels alive: it respects the women’s separateness while honoring the shock of seeing beauty flare out from behind a quiet surface.