Amy Lowell, a leading voice in early twentieth-century Imagism, published “Anticipation” in her 1919 collection *Pictures of the Floating World*. Lowell wrote at a moment when American poetry was shedding rigid meter and polite subject matter, and her own work often fused precise sensory detail with open emotional hunger. This short lyric belongs to that current: it is not a neat sonnet about longing but a breathless confession of desire that feels almost unmanageable.
The speaker begins by defining herself through self-restraint: “I have been temperate always.” That word “temperate” suggests moderation, sobriety, perhaps even a life of careful control. Yet the second line immediately overturns it—she is “like to be very drunk” simply because the beloved is coming. The central idea is not the arrival itself but the state just before it, when expectation becomes so intense that it alters the body. Anticipation turns the speaker into someone who might “reel with the wine of you” or stumble against neighbors on the street. She has not touched a drop, but the thought of the other person intoxicates her. The poem therefore treats desire as a force that dissolves the boundaries between emotional and physical, public and private.
The construction mirrors that loss of control. Lowell uses free verse, so there is no regular rhyme or meter to hold the speaker steady. The lines are short, often falling into fragments, which keeps the voice from sounding composed or oratorical. Lines break at tense moments—“But I am like to be very drunk / With your coming”—and that pause after “drunk” makes the reader wait, just as the speaker waits. The wine imagery runs through the whole lyric: the “wine of you,” the fear of reeling, the “filling wine-cups” at the end. Even the speaker’s mouth is involved, though in a strikingly unromantic way: “my tongue is horrible in my mouth.” This is not dreamy yearning; it is thirst with a physical edge. The word “parched” carries both dryness and need, and it clashes with the wet, gurgling sound that fills her brain.
Sound also sharpens the final image. The poem closes not with a kiss or an embrace but with “the clash and gurgle of filling wine-cups,” an auditory rush inside the speaker’s head. “Clash” and “gurgle” are harsh and liquid at once, suggesting celebration, chaos, and appetite all happening internally. The brain is “noisy,” not calm, even as the body feels parched and tense. That contrast between the dry mouth and the flooded mind captures the paradox of anticipation: the longed-for thing is not yet present, yet its imagined nearness is already overwhelming.
What makes “Anticipation” significant is how boldly it gives a woman’s desire its own voice. The speaker does not apologize for feeling drunk or for fearing that she might lose her composure in public. She confesses the intensity without asking permission. In just a handful of lines, Lowell makes longing feel immediate and physical, and she does so through compact free verse and a single dominating metaphor. The poem remains powerful because it stops before fulfillment; its energy comes from the trembling interval between restraint and release, where the wine is still being poured.