September 1918 by Amy Lowell

September 1918

by Amy Lowell

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

If you did not pay much attention to the title, or are not good with dates in history, it is not until the 9th line that war is mentioned. Lowell was, of course, referring to World War I, which began on July 28, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918, a few months after this poem takes place.

Amy Lowell often gets short shrift, and I think that is unfortunate. The images in the first part of the poem, lines 1-8, are full of color. My particular favorite is "sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves." The two young boys makes our focus more specific and gently moves us from nature and the larger world to this moment in time. The boys also remind us that these two, should the war continue, will soon be going off to war.

The real genius of this poem is the second part. Lowell turns the afternoon she has just descrived into something that can be tasted, like those berries the boys are picking. She also refers back to the leaves, and their "crisp variety."

The boys were putting their berries into a box, and that is what the speaker does--she puts the afternoon into her lunchbox. She has no time to savor it because--and this is how many of us feel, are struggling with and fighting against in our world today,

. . . I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

I do not know if knowing that previous generations went through similar emotions is a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it is comforting to know others went through awful times and lived through it. But maybe the knowledge that we have to keep fighting ignorance and evil feels like defeat. Most likely, it creates both reactions, often within minutes of each other.

Amy Lowell is often grouped with the Imagists, and rightly so--she certainly has many of that movements characteristics in her poems. I see her also as very modern, though, and certainly not Modernist. Her work has a lot in common with the poets of a later wartime period--Vietnam. Lowell's directness fits in with the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. She was long gone by then--she died in 1925 (she was awarded the Pulitzer the following year). Her cousin was the poet Robert Lowell, and they were both descendants of the poet James Russell Lowell. Amy Lowell was also an editor, a biographer, a performer, and a translator, and she often scandalized the uppercrust New England society she was born into with her feminism, outspokenness, drive, intelligence, and sexuality. She was in a relationship with the actress Ada Russell, whom she met in 1909, until her death. She is another poet whose life was very interesting, including the fact that Ezra Pound hated her and much of the critical dislike of her work is based in homophobia and sexism.