Chinois Poetry Year Continued…Amy Lowell Reflects

Posted: July 13th, 2012 | No Comments »

What do you mean you forgot that 2012 was China Rhyming’s year of Chinois poetry? How could you – what do you mean some of it’s a bit rubbish!! How dare you – we’ve had Ezra Pound, WB Yeats, Sacheverell and Edith Sitwell, not to mention Vachel Lindsay (twice). Well, you’re going to get some more – it’s good for you!!

And we’ll start today with a genuine Big Beast (literally actually) in the field of Chinois poetry – the “hippopoetess” (as Ezra Pound called her, because she was obese) Amy Lowell (1874-1925), friend of Florence Ayscough and Harriert Monroe and all those leading gals of things Chinois (and a lot more on this blog to come soon about Florence Ayscough). But today, it’s Lowell’s “Reflections“, published in a journal of poems edited by Harriet Monroe entitled The New Poetry and published in 1917.

WHEN I looked into your eyes,

I saw a garden

With peonies, and tinkling pagodas,

And round-arched bridges

Over still lakes.

A woman sat beside the water

In a rain-blue, silken garment.

She reached through the water

To pluck the crimson peonies

Beneath the surface,

But as she grasped the stems,

They jarred and broke into white-green ripples,

And as she drew out her hand,

The water-drops dripping from it

Stained her rain-blue dress like tears.

 

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