Amy Lowell, an American poet associated with the Imagist movement, published “Misericordia” in her 1914 collection Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, the year the First World War began. The collection’s title already places a weapon next to a flower, and this poem draws on the same collision of violence and tenderness. The Latin word misericordia means mercy, and its root also gives us misericorde, a short medieval blade used to give a wounded knight a merciful death. From the opening, compassion and the sword are inseparable.
The narrative is brief but quietly shocking. A craftsman makes his living by producing wooden soldiers, playthings fitted with “beautiful golden instruments” and riding “dapple-grey horses.” These little figures make war look decorative and harmless. But when the real army marches out of the city with “the fanfare of trumpets / And the long rattle of drums,” something cracks in him. He burns all his toy soldiers in the grate. That same night he creates a ballet dancer from “tinted tissue-paper,” and the next day he starts carving a Pietà on the steel hilt of a cavalry sword. The movement is not random: once actual war invades his ears, the craftsman rejects the charming miniature violence he used to sell. His second creation is fragile, ephemeral beauty; his third places the Virgin’s grief directly onto a weapon. Together they suggest an artist trying to answer war not with more ornament but with acts of conscience.
The poem’s free verse gives that turn its force. There is no regular rhyme, and the short lines make each image arrive separately, like a sequence of quiet commands. The opening phrase has the soft storybook charm of “wooden soldiers,” “beautiful golden instruments,” and “dapple-grey horses.” Then the sounds grow harder: “fanfare of trumpets” and “long rattle of drums” are percussive, almost onomatopoeic, and the word “rattle” refuses to settle. The crucial sentence is deliberately plain: “He took all his soldiers / And burned them in the grate.” The words are mostly monosyllables; the action is stark and irreversible. In the last lines, the repeated “And that night” and “And the next day” create a ritual rhythm, as though the craftsman has entered a new vocation. The contrast between “tinted tissue-paper” and “steel hilt” is sharp: one is delicate and ephemeral, the other cold and militarised. The final image—a Pietà being carved on a cavalry sword—is the poem’s most compressed and surprising act of word-making, because it fuses religious pity with the material of war.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to stop at a simple anti-war gesture. The craftsman does not merely reject his toy soldiers; he burns the source of his bread. He then turns to art that is not useful for war: a tissue dancer, a sacred image of mourning. Yet he does not pretend the sword does not exist. He takes that real weapon and begins to carve mercy into it, an unfinished labour signalled by the verb “started.” In thirteen lines, Lowell moves from nursery toys to the Pietà, from child’s play to adult grief, and asks what it means to make things after the drums have passed.