SWORD BLADES AND POPPY SEED
by Amy Lowell
[American (Massachusetts) poet, 1874-1925.]
[Transcriber’s note: Lines longer than 78 characters have been cut and
continued on the next line, which is indented 2 spaces unless in a prose
poem.]
SWORD BLADES AND POPPY SEED
Preface
No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there
is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his
verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of
fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same
painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker. His heart may overflow with high
thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader
by means of the written word he has no claim to be considered a poet. A
workman may be pardoned, therefore, for spending a few moments to explain
and describe the technique of his trade. A work of beauty which cannot
stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.
In the first place, I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not
try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty,
even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque. We do not ask the
trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it
necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous,
but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a
work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous, but timid
and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with
our impertinent suggestions. How far we are from “admitting the Universe”!
The Universe, which flings down its continents and seas, and leaves them
without comment. Art is as much a function of the Universe as an
Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and we insist upon
considering it merely a little scroll-work, of no great importance unless
it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be
hung!
For the purely technical side I must state my immense debt to the French,
and perhaps above all to the, so-called, Parnassian School, although some
of the writers who have influenced me most do not belong to it.
High-minded and untiring workmen, they have spared no pains to produce a
poetry finer than that of any other country in our time. Poetry so full of
beauty and feeling, that the study of it is at once an inspiration and a
despair to the artist. The Anglo-Saxon of our day has a tendency to think
that a fine idea excuses slovenly workmanship. These clear-eyed Frenchmen
are a reproof to our self-satisfied laziness. Before the works of
Parnassians like Leconte de Lisle, and José-Maria de Heredia, or those of
Henri de Régnier, Albert Samain, Francis Jammes, Remy de Gourmont, and
Paul Fort, of the more modern school, we stand rebuked. Indeed—”They
order this matter better in France.”
It is because in France, to-day, poetry is so living and vigorous a thing,
that so many metrical experiments come from there. Only a vigorous tree
has the vitality to put forth new branches. The poet with originality and
power is always seeking to give his readers the same poignant feeling
which he has himself. To do this he must constantly find new and striking
images, delightful and unexpected forms. Take the word “daybreak”, for
instance. What a remarkable picture it must once have conjured up! The
great, round sun, like the yolk of some mighty egg, BREAKING through
cracked and splintered clouds. But we have said “daybreak” so often that
we do not see the picture any more, it has become only another word for
dawn. The poet must be constantly seeking new pictures to make his readers
feel the vitality of his thought.
Many of the poems in this volume are written in what the French call “Vers
Libre”, a nomenclature more suited to French use and to French
versification than to ours. I prefer to call them poems in “unrhymed
cadence”, for that conveys their exact meaning to an English ear. They are
built upon “organic rhythm”, or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its
necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. They
differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved, and containing
more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular
metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more
subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose
lines into lengths does not produce cadence, it is constructed upon
mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his
“Poems”, Henley speaks of “those unrhyming rhythms in which I had tried to
quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme.” The desire
to “quintessentialize”, to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot,
seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly “unrhymed
cadence” is unique in its power of expressing this.
Three of these poems are written in a form which, so far as I know, has
never before been attempted in English. M. Paul Fort is its inventor, and
the results it has yielded to him are most beautiful and satisfactory.
Perhaps it is more suited to the French language than to English. But I
found it the only medium in which these particular poems could be written.
It is a fluid and changing form, now prose, now verse, and permitting a
great variety of treatment.
But the reader will see that I have not entirely abandoned the more
classic English metres. I cannot see why, because certain manners suit
certain emotions and subjects, it should be considered imperative for an
author to employ no others. Schools are for those who can confine
themselves within them. Perhaps it is a weakness in me that I cannot.
In conclusion, I would say that these remarks are in answer to many
questions asked me by people who have happened to read some of these poems
in periodicals. They are not for the purpose of forestalling criticism,
nor of courting it; and they deal, as I said in the beginning, solely with
the question of technique. For the more important part of the book, the
poems must speak for themselves.
Amy Lowell.
May 19,
1914.
Sword Blades And Poppy Seed
SWORD BLADES
The Captured Goddess
The Precinct. Rochester
The Cyclists
Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window
A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.
Astigmatism
The Coal Picker
Storm-Racked
Convalescence
Patience
Apology
A Petition
A Blockhead
Stupidity
Irony
Happiness
The Last Quarter of the Moon
A Tale of Starvation
The Foreigner
. . . . .
Absence
A Gift
The Bungler
Fool’s Money Bags
Miscast I
Miscast II
Anticipation
Vintage
The Tree of Scarlet Berries
Obligation
The Taxi
The Giver of Stars
The Temple
Epitaph of a Young Poet Who Died Before Having Achieved Success
In Answer to a Request
POPPY SEED
The Great Adventure of Max Breuck
Sancta Maria, Succurre Miseris
After Hearing a Waltz by Bartók
Clear, with Light, Variable Winds
The Basket
In a Castle
The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde
The Exeter Road
The Shadow
The Forsaken
Late September
The Pike
The Blue Scarf
White and Green
Aubade
Music
A Lady
In a Garden
A Tulip Garden
[End of original text.]
Notes:
The following unconnected lines in the etext are presented sans accents:
Some books by Amy Lowell:
About the author:
From the notes to “The Second Book of Modern Verse” (1919, 1920), edited
by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.
Lowell, Amy. Born in Brookline, Mass., Feb. 9, 1874. Educated at private
schools. Author of “A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass”, 1912; “Sword Blades
and Poppy Seed”, 1914; “Men, Women and Ghosts”, 1916; “Can Grande’s
Castle”, 1918; “Pictures of the Floating World”, 1919. Editor of the three
successive collections of “Some Imagist Poets”, 1915, ’16, and ’17,
containing the early work of the “Imagist School” of which Miss Lowell
became the leader. This movement,… originated in England, the idea have
been first conceived by a young poet named T. E. Hulme, but developed and
put forth by Ezra Pound in an article called “Don’ts by an Imagist”, which
appeared in `Poetry; A Magazine of Verse’. … A small group of poets
gathered about Mr. Pound, experimenting along the technical lines
suggested, and a cult of “Imagism” was formed, whose first
group-expression was in the little volume, “Des Imagistes”, published in
New York in April, 1914. Miss Lowell did not come actively into the
movement until after that time, but once she had entered it, she became
its leader, and it was chiefly through her effort in America that the
movement attained so much prominence and so influenced the trend of poetry
for the years immediately succeeding. Miss Lowell many times, in admirable
articles, stated the principles upon which Imagism is based, notably in
the Preface to “Some Imagist Poets” and in the Preface to the second
series, in 1916. She also elaborated it much more fully in her volume,
“Tendencies in Modern American Poetry”, 1917, in the articles pertaining
to the work of “H.D.” and John Gould Fletcher. In her own creative work,
however, Miss Lowell did most to establish the possibilities of the
Imagistic idea and of its modes of presentation, and opened up many
interesting avenues of poetic form. Her volume, “Can Grande’s Castle”, is
devoted to work in the medium which she styled “Polyphonic Prose” and
contains some of her finest work, particularly “The Bronze Horses”.