A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow-ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
What we love about this poem…
The free verse form that is characteristic of Lowell’s work gives this 1919 poem a frame that shifts and breathes as it is read, which she explained as ‘organic rhythm’. The scented blooming overload of a moon-cooled summer night is as palpable as is the tension of tantalising stillness, punctuated only by a black cat’s silent paws and the quiet play of light and shadow.
Saturated with the names of flowers — phlox, alyssum, stock, ladies’ delight — the garden is known and adored in careful detail, like the changing yet constant body of a loved one. But moving on at last from overwhelming vibrancy of sense, the final lines give way to a wistful sad thought. The garden, so seasonal and transitory, paradoxically lives longer than those who walk through it, their passionate yet passing lives witnessed by the ever-renewing flowers.
About the author…
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet and literary editor known for her contributions to Imagism. She was greatly inspired by East Asian visual art and poetry, as shown in her collection, Pictures of the Floating World (1919). Born to an upper-class Boston family, Lowell was a prodigious poet and bestselling literary figure throughout her life, though she did not attend university as it was not considered ladylike by her family. Famously fierce and forthright, she was often subjected to harsh criticism by critics who resorted to vicious body-shaming, or lampooned her masculine sense of dress and habit of smoking cigars. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were particularly critical, especially of Lowell’s speaking tours promoting the value and power of Imagist verse in the 1910s. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for What’s O’Clock.
The great love of her life, actress Ada Dwyer Russell, is the subject of many of her love poems, especially the collection Two Speak Together. ‘Lady of the moon’ was a name Lowell sometimes used for Dwyer, and lunar references in her poetry are often about her. They first met in 1909 and moved in together in 1914 in a relationship that ended only with Lowell’s death in 1925.
To Read Alongside…
Our recent Rose is a Rose post explores roses and sapphic loving in the work of other poets. In addition, we have featured Lowell’s work before, in our Snowy Mountains newsletter.
Poet Mary Meriam has adapted many of Lowell’s sonnets for her collection Lady of the Moon. Here is an excerpt from the villanelle ‘Laurel’s Leaving’ via Cultural Daily:
Now she is a tree unshod, unzipped, she carries greenery fresh and clipped under a moon undergoing eclipse, a whole-hearted she with a she she strips.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was a huge influence on Lowell’s poetry. Lowell was instrumental in publishing much of H.D.’s poetry, and introduced her to D.H. Lawrence as another Imagist poet. H.D.’s ‘Oread’ (1915) is considered to be one of the defining poems of the Imagist movement, an indivisible evocation of sea and land:
Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.
Ezra Pound, though antagonistic to Lowell, was nonetheless a poetic influence, especially in the modernist desire to convey idea as image, responding to western fascination with haiku and the artistic Japanese tradition of ukiyo-e ('picture[s] of the floating world', as in the image above) and the twentieth-century revival of this style, shinhanga. (Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) overtly invokes this tradition.) Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ encapsulates the sparse Imagist spirit of conveying full idea through a single clear image:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
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