m18

||>  Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Well educated and well spoken, Amy Lowell offended many during a time period when women were regarded as little more than decoration. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts to New England Aristocrats, Lowell was wealthy and privileged. Amy was educated at first by a governess and later by exclusive New England private schools who labeled her a noisy, outspoken terror in the classroom. After finishing her formal education, Lowell continued to learn by reading the 7,000 volumes of books in her father's library. Lowell, a true bibliophile, drank in the words and knowledge that spurred her creativity.
 * == Amy Lowell ==

Traveling with her family during summer vacations and after her debut proved fodder for her poetry. After enduring the death of both parents, surviving a disastrous engagement, and outliving the vicious lies of her society, Lowell discovered her vocation. She was twenty-eight. In 1912, Lowell's first book of poetry was published only to be trashed by the critics.

Later that same year, Lowell met her muse Ada Dwyer Russell. Russell, an actress, stayed with Lowell for the rest of her life dealing with the ups and downs of Lowell's creativity. Inspired by H. D (Hilda Doolittle) and Ezra Pound, Lowell became an advocate for the Imagist movement. She published another volume of poetry in 1914, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, that established Amy Lowell as an American Imagist. Lowell was as prolific in her publications as she was in testing different styles of writing. Her final publication, a biography on John Keats, was received well in America but not in England, Keat's home. Some say her disappointment was the cause of her death later that same year in 1925.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/life.htm

Poetry links
|| * [|Apology] [|Wikimedia Commons] ||
 * [|Autumn]
 * [|Before Dawn]
 * [|Azure and Gold]
 * [|Song] ||< [[image:azure_gold.jpg width="654" height="349"]]

==Explication of "Patterns"   == "Patterns" by Amy Lowell is a perfect juxtaposition of reality and desires. The speaker of the poem, a young woman who considered herself " a rare pattern" (l. 7-8), walks through a garden soaking in the contrast of her stiff attire with the freedom of nature. Her "stiff" dress reminds her of the constraints of her position as a woman and her current circumstance. "The daffodils and squills/ Flutter in the breeze/ as they please./ And I weep;/ For the lime-tree is in blossom/ And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom" ( l. 24-27).

The beginning of the poem is set during Spring; our speaker recalls her first encounter with her lover and the playfulness of nature during this exciting season. Flirtatious and full of lust, "with the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,/ and the plopping of the waterdrops,/ all about us in the open afternoon--/ I am very like to swoon/ With the weight of this brocade,/ For the sun sifts through the shade" ( l. 55-60). This same stiff brocade (dress) that, at first, is constricting with desire quickly melts to sorrow. Learning of her lover's, soon to be fiance, death, the pattern of her dress (and life) become constricting in a new way. Her hopes of changing the pattern of her life vanish with her love's ashes. "We would have broken the pattern;/ He for me, and I as Lady," ( l. 86-87). Now, just as the seasons are patterned to repeat, one after another, our speaker must endure life filled with a pattern she does not like. Her hopes to change her life and the cycle she feels doomed to repeat is embodied her her dress, "and the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace/ By each button, hook, and lace./ For the man should loose me is dead,/ Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,/In a pattern called war./ Christ! What are patterns for?" ( l. 105-110). Patterns, while entrancing, can also be suffocating.