Amy Lowell (1874–1925) was one of the most energetic champions of Imagism in American poetry, arguing for free verse built from precise sensory impressions rather than Victorian abstractions. “Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String,” published in her 1919 collection *Pictures of the Floating World*, arrives out of that context: it feels arranged like a series of painted moments—a Mediterranean café, a moonlit street, a dance—yet it moves with the pressure of a heartbeat. The title’s tiny carved puppets suggest delicate, lifelike figures animated from outside, and the poem asks whether a person will remain one of those beautiful objects or rise into the risky, full-bodied present.
The poem is addressed to an “Old Man” who sits gazing into a glass and tapping his fingers, though mandolins tinkle nearby and moonlight creeps between olive-trees. The speaker challenges his detachment, asking whether it is the music, the falling bitter-orange petals, or the slow moonlight that disturbs him. The central idea is the contest between living inside one’s head and surrendering to the sensual world. The old man is told he drinks “only from your brains,” while the speaker urges him to “Rise up on the music” and join a dance of “slim thighs and arms of silver.” The recurring image of rain on “the thin plates of my heart” keeps the speaker from becoming merely a lecturer: that heart is vulnerable, struck and crumpled by the storm, yet still capable of response. The old man’s spoon-jarring is a frustrated miniature dance, a rhythm he feels but will not let lift him out of his chair.
Lowell builds the poem without regular meter or rhyme, relying instead on repetition, parallel questions, and imperative verbs. Three “Or” questions open the scene, then the line “Drop ! drop ! the rain” breaks into short percussive units, as if the rain itself were tapping on a drum. The phrase “plates of my heart” returns three times with increasing intensity: first the rain knocks, then the plates are crumpled with beating, and finally the rain is “rigid” on those plates while its murmur is “loud — loud.” Short image-fragments such as “Leaping grape-clusters. / Vine leaves tearing from a grey wall” create a quickening pace, like steps in a dance. Commands—string, stir, rise, fling, run, weave—transform the poem from observation into an urgent invitation.
The imagery carries the argument more than any abstract statement. Mandolins, coffee-cups, and bitter-orange petals create a sensuous but slightly sharp atmosphere; the blossom is lovely yet not sweet. Moonlight is not a gentle glow but an active force that “washes away their garments” and falls on the old man’s head “in an accolade of silver.” Green grapes knot and burst as bodies press together, blending celebration with physical hunger, while the promised run includes weaving flowers “with the frosty spines of thorns.” Joy in this poem is never safe; it includes thorns and bruises. The ivory figures of the title stand behind the old man, who is pale, still, and exquisitely controlled, yet the speaker wants him to become a leaping, vine-tearing body in the moonlight.
The poem’s significance lies in its demonstration that Imagist compression need not be cold or decorative. Lowell turns precise images into emotional pressure, and she leaves the ending unresolved: the old man may still refuse, but the rain’s murmur has become overwhelming. Art, the poem suggests, can be like a delicate ivory object or like a pulse beating under the moon—and Lowell clearly prefers the pulse.