Spring is in full, glorious bloom in Crozet and throughout central Virginia—the season of plant sales and gardening joys. Daffodils, redbuds, and Virginia bluebells have given way to dogwoods, viburnum, and bleeding heart—with magnolia and hydrangea not far behind. Lilacs, the queen of spring, delight us in April but often last into May. The intoxicating scent from my three lilac bushes pervades my whole yard. Of course, in New England, where poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925) lived and wrote, all of these blooms are delayed about a month.
First published in the New York Post in 1920, “Lilacs” was said to be one of poet Amy Lowell’s own favorite poems, which she often included in public readings. This is an excerpt from a much longer poem, representing the final 26 lines of the 109-line free-verse poem. In this lovely, modernist poem, Lowell celebrates the color, smell, and enchantment of lilacs and of spring.
To begin this section, the poet reiterates her setting and focuses on the color of her floral subject. In a kind of synesthesia, she paints lilac as the color of New England itself. Like an incantation, her heady repetition of “May is” emphasizes the variety of sights, sounds, and feelings of springtime. Clouds are personified, like proud, “puffed out” soldiers parading across the sky. Earlier in the poem, she personifies the lilacs, addressing them directly as “you” and describing the lilac blooms themselves as “great puffs of flowers.” She highlights the beauty of the newly-emerged, short-lived spring green leaves, the rain-softened earth, and the sweet, fragrant air that blows in at the windows from the South. Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island here represents the southern boundary of New England.
Lowell is best known for her “tireless efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary, [modernist] trends in poetry” in the years before World War I. She was the first to bring the Imagism of Ezra Pound (1885-1972), H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961), and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) to the attention of Americans. Imagism was “an early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language” to replace the “tyranny” of traditional rhyme, poetic diction, and meter (poetryfoundation.org). Imagists favored poems structured around a single image or metaphor, avoiding any abstract meaning or “message.” One striking example is Ezra Pound’s brilliant, short 1913 poem,
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough
In her preface to the 1916 anthology Some Imagist Poets, Lowell defined Imagist poetry as that which uses the language of common speech, creates new rhythms, presents an image, and is “hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” Her celebration of Imagism is evident in “Lilacs,” which has no hidden meaning, but develops the single concrete image of lilacs, examining them from every possible angle, and celebrating both their physical and spiritual qualities. We can almost see and taste the signs of spring animating the poet’s corner of the world.
The last stanza presents a litany of the shades of color encompassed in the word “lilac.” Love is evoked by the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac bush, whose roots spread throughout New England, uniting its six states (four of which she names earlier in the poem). Moving from a broad to a narrow focus, with “Lilacs in me” the poet suggests that the lilacs invade even her soul. She once again uses the incantatory repetition of “Because…” to emphasize her oneness with the plant. In a mystical metaphor, the poet herself becomes a lilac bush. She also becomes her country, expressing her patriotism with “I am New England” and “certainly it is mine.” She owns, identifies with, and celebrates her beautiful, lilac-enwrapped country, as well as embracing her place in it. “Singing with [one’s] own voice” is the ambition of every poet, so here she achieves a rare level of ecstasy. In lines reminiscent of the poetry of Walt Whitman, she has moved from the beauty of a lilac bush to the passion of patriotism and self-actualization.
Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts to a prominent Boston family. Poet John Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was an ancestor, and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was a distant cousin. She published her first poem in the Atlantic when she was 36. In addition to her ten volumes of poetry and two books of literary criticism, in 1915 she became editor of the annual anthology of Imagist poetry and also edited numerous poetry anthologies. Lowell’s long-time partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of her romantic poems.
Just before her death in 1925, Lowell also published an exhaustive biography of John Keats, whom she viewed as the spiritual forebear of Imagist poetry. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Healey and Ingram described Lowell as “the embodiment of the new liberated woman,” expressly citing the poet’s “unlimited faith in her own capability.” She witnessed the ratification of the 19th amendment granting women’s suffrage in 1920. Saturday Review of Literature critic John Livingston Lowes deemed the poems “in their exquisite art, among the masterpieces of their kind” (poetryfoundation.org). Her poem “Lilacs” comes from the collection What’s O’Clock, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. May your garden thrive this spring!
