Amy Lowell wrote "September, 1918" in the late months of the First World War, from the home front rather than the trenches. As an American Imagist, she believed in letting concrete images carry feeling, and the date in her title fixes the poem in a specific autumn when the war was still unresolved. The opening scene feels almost unbearably beautiful: "This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight," light made liquid, and the trees "glittered with the tumbling of leaves." The sidewalks shine "like alleys of dropped maple leaves," and even the houses seem to laugh "out of square, open windows." Then the eye settles on two little boys lying flat on their faces, carefully gathering red berries into a pasteboard box. The whole world appears alive, innocent, and luminous, yet the title's date quietly insists that this beauty is surrounded by war.
The central tension of the poem is not on a battlefield but inside the speaker's mind. She cannot fully live in the lovely present because the war has shattered ordinary time. She imagines a future: "Some day there will be no war." Only then can she "take out this afternoon / And turn it in my fingers," as if the moment were a smooth stone or a saved object. The language becomes deliberately sensory—she would "remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate" and "note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves." Memory is imagined as something edible, tactile, almost nourishing. But for now, "To-day I can only gather it / And put it into my lunch-box." The lunch-box is a poignant choice: a container for daily sustenance, here holding a ration of beauty to be consumed later, after survival.
The poem's form reinforces this arrested experience. Lowell uses free verse without rhyme, and the short lines create a halting, careful movement, as if the speaker is picking up fragments one by one. The two boys "lying flat on their faces" echo that attention; they are "carefully gathering red berries," just as the speaker gathers the afternoon. The word "gather" links the child's play to the adult's act of preservation. Personification gives the scene a kind of reckless joy—"the houses ran along them laughing"—but the speaker cannot join that laughter. The final image is precarious: "the endeavour to balance myself / Upon a broken world." The word "endeavour" feels effortful and formal, and the line break after "nothing" in the previous line leaves a pause, as though the speaker is catching her breath. The broken world is not described with explosions or blood; it appears only as an unstable surface beneath her feet.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet, civilian witness. It does not depict combat, yet it shows how war reaches into the most ordinary afternoon and makes simple pleasure impossible. The pasteboard box and the lunch-box become small, homely symbols of preservation: children store red berries, while the speaker stores an entire afternoon. Lowell's Imagist precision—water, light, maple leaves, red berries—gives the memory weight without sentimentality. The poem's final uncertainty is honest. It offers no easy comfort, only the effort to keep balancing and to keep something beautiful saved for a time after war. That restraint is exactly why the poem still feels immediate: it understands that sometimes survival means tucking an afternoon away and waiting to taste it later.