Amy Lowell, born in 1874 into a prominent New England family, became one of the most energetic American champions of Imagism, the early twentieth-century movement that insisted on crisp, uncluttered images and the musical possibilities of free verse. Her short lyric "Aubade" belongs to this modern moment, yet it also talks back to a much older tradition: an aubade is conventionally a dawn song in which lovers must part. Lowell keeps the hushed intimacy of morning but replaces parting with a fantasy of slow, attentive unveiling.
At first the speaker seems to be doing something domestic—peeling an almond. The opening simile reaches from the kitchen or orchard into the heart of a relationship: "As I would free the white almond from the green husk / So would I strip your trappings off, / Beloved." The green husk and the white almond enact the central contrast between outer covering and inner value. In the same gesture, the speaker imagines removing the "trappings" that hide the beloved. Those trappings may be literal clothing, but they also suggest the roles, defenses, and social surfaces that people wear. What matters is not the stripping itself but the care behind it. The verb "free" softens "strip"; the speaker does not want to conquer or expose, but to release something already precious from what confines it.
The poem's center is the word "Beloved," placed alone on its own line. That isolation gives it the weight of a title, a vow, or a breath held before a delicate touch. The next image moves from seeing to touching: "fingering the smooth and polished kernel." The word "fingering" is intimate and tactile, yet "smooth and polished" keeps the contact reverent. The kernel is not rough or raw; it has been perfected by nature, as though the beloved's true self is complete before the speaker ever arrives. The final line turns that kernel into "a gem beyond counting." The leap from food to jewel is the poem's most extravagant shift, and it lands with quiet force. A gem can be admired, held, valued, but it cannot be counted; its worth is not a number. Love, in Lowell's version, is precisely that recognition of worth that exceeds measurement.
Lowell builds the poem from two sentences. The first suspends the reader in an "As..." clause and completes it with a "So..." clause, so the comparison feels inevitable. The second moves from the participial act of "fingering" to the main clause "I should see," shifting from touch to vision. The lines do not fall into regular meter or rhyme, but their sounds are placed carefully: "free" and "green" echo across the opening line, while "smooth and polished" and "glittered a gem" make the ending gleam. The visual palette moves from green husk to white almond to the flash of a jewel, so the poem itself feels like an act of peeling away dullness to arrive at brightness. Because the lyric is only five lines long, each word must carry weight, and Lowell uses the Imagist principle of compression to make a whole relationship live inside one extended simile.
What makes "Aubade" significant is its quiet boldness. Written in a period when women's desire was often constrained or treated as something to be hidden, Lowell places a woman in the position of the one who looks, touches, and names value. The beloved is addressed without gender, which allows the poem to speak to many forms of love while also preserving the privacy of its original feeling. Rather than reducing intimacy to possession, Lowell defines it as attention: patient enough to remove each layer, honest enough to see the gem beneath, and wise enough to know that some things cannot be counted.