Most read ▸
Amy Lowell
A LITTLE brown room in a sea of fields.
Fields pink as rose-mallows
Under a fading rose-mallow sky.
Four candles on a tall iron candlestick.
Clustered like altar lights.
Above, the models of four brown Chinese junks
Sailing round the brown walls.
Silent and motionless.
The quick cut of a vibrating string.
Another, and another.
Biting into the silence.
Notes pierce, sharper and sharper ;
They draw up in a freshness of sound.
Higher — higher, to the whiteness of intolerable beauty.
They are jagged and clear.
Like snow peaks against the sky ;
My ache is
a green thing,
a simple music.
It plays well
on a violin.
But how I cry
for the home
and weather
I left!
In the morning din,
the cock had a harp and violin
played to an inquisitive hen-house end:
to go within.
Together in the round house
we were merry and good-natured;
alone, a melancholy violin
called me to supper.
Musician, give a voice to me!
Oh quicken wood and string,
Unburden me of ecstasy,
For I have songs to sing!
Of faces forward through dark rains,
Of torn but valiant feet,
Of blood that runs in shrinking veins,
Of broken hearts that beat.
Of crooked boughs that have kept true
The promise to fulfill,
Of thwarted roots that yet pursue
Their purpose in the hill.
Oh all you safe and smooth of heart
Listen to song from me,
Whose wooden throat was once a part
Of the north side of a tree!
In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.
Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.
Three violins are trying their hearts.
The piece is MacDowell's Wild Rose.
And the time of the wild rose
And the leaves of the wild rose
And the dew-shot eyes of the wild rose
Sing in the air over three violins.
Somebody like you was in the heart of MacDowell.
Somebody like you is in three violins.
Sell me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood.
Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead
where men kiss sisters they love.
Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching
the knees and arms of a storm.
Sell me horsehair and rosin that has sucked at the breasts
of the morning sun for milk.
Sell me something crushed in the heartsblood of pain
readier than ever for one more song.