He whistled a little frivolous tune Which he felt to be pulsing with ecstasy, For he thought that success always followed desire, Such a very superlative fool was he.
A maiden came by on an ambling mule, Her gown was rose-red and her kerchief blue, On her lap she carried a basket of eggs. Thought the fool, "There is certainly room for two."
So he jauntily swaggered towards the maid
And put out his hand to the bridle-rein. "My pretty girl," quoth the fool, "take me up, For to ride with you to the town I am fain."
But the maiden struck at his upraised arm And pelted him hotly with eggs, a score. The mule, lashed into a fury, ran; The fool went back to his stone and swore.
Then out of the cloud of settling dust The burly form of an abbot appeared, Reading his office he rode to the town. And the fool got up, for his heart was cheered.
He stood in the midst of the long, white road And swept off his cap till it touched the ground. "Ah, Reverent Sir, well met," said the fool, "A worthier transport never was found.
"I pray you allow me to mount with you, Your palfrey seems both sturdy and young." The abbot looked up from the holy book And cried out in anger, "Hold your tongue!
"How dare you obstruct the King's highroad, You saucy varlet, get out of my way." Then he gave the fool a cut with his whip
And leaving him smarting, he rode away.
The fool was angry, the fool was sore, And he cursed the folly of monks and maids. "If I could but meet with a man," sighed the fool, "For a woman fears, and a friar upbraids."
Then he saw a flashing of distant steel And the clanking of harness greeted his ears, And up the road journeyed knights-at-arms, With waving plumes and glittering spears.
The fool took notice and slowly arose, Not quite so sure was his foolish heart. If priests and women would none of him Was it likely a knight would take his part?
They sang as they rode, these lusty boys, When one chanced to turn toward the highway's side, "There's a sorry figure of fun," jested he, "Well, Sirrah! move back, there is scarce room to ride."
"Good Sirs, Kind Sirs," begged the crestfallen fool, "I pray of your courtesy speech with you, I'm for yonder town, and have no horse to ride, Have you never a charger will carry two?"
Then the company halted and laughed out loud. "Was such a request ever made to a knight?" "And where are your legs," asked one, "if you start, You may be inside the town gates to-night."
"'T is a lazy fellow, let him alone, They've no room in the town for such idlers as he." But one bent from his saddle and said, "My man, Art thou not ashamed to beg charity!
"Thou art well set up, and thy legs are strong, But it much misgives me lest thou'rt a fool; For beggars get only a beggar's crust, Wise men are reared in a different school."
Then they clattered away in the dust and the wind, And the fool slunk back to his lonely stone; He began to see that the man who asks Must likewise give and not ask alone.
Purple tree-shadows crept over the road, The level sun flung an orange light, And the fool laid his head on the hard, gray stone And wept as he realized advancing night.
A great, round moon rose over a hill And the steady wind blew yet more cool; And crouched on a stone a wayfarer sobbed, For at last he knew he was only a fool.
About the author
About the poet
an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Personal Life
Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell.
She never attended college because her family did not consider that proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.
Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of her more erotic work, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered her embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hi-jacking of the movement, and among his friends he referred to her as the "hippo-poetess". Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse.
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of 51. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", which Louis Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best.
Career
Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later in 1912. An additional group of uncollected poems was added to the volume The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend.
Though she sometimes wrote sonnets, Lowell was an early adherent to the "free verse" method of poetry and one of the major champions of this method. Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener." In many poems she dispenses with line breaks so that the work looks like prose on the page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose".
Throughout her working life Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her book Fir-Flower Poets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po (A.D. 701-762). Her writing also included critical works on French literature. When she died she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography of John Keats. Writing of Keats, Lowell said that "The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius."
Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound. and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."
Lowell not only published her own work but also that of other writers. According to Untermyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.
Altercation with F. Holland Day
Lowell was frustrated in composing her biography of Keats by the famous publisher and photographer, F. Holland Day. Day, alongside an unrivaled possession of Keatsiana, possessed exclusive copies of Fanny Brawne's letters to Keats. Fanny was the woman whom Keats had unsuccessfully pursued and the letters were therefore of considerable biographical interest. Lowell, who hoped to publish the definitive volume of biography, was forced to pursue a reluctant and rather mischievously reticent Day for these artifacts with little success.
Legacy
In the post-World War II years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell personally argued against feminism.
Additional sources of interest in Lowell today come from the anti-war sentiment of the oft-taught poem "Patterns"; her personification of inanimate objects, as in "The Green Bowl," and "The Red Lacquer Music Stand"; and her lesbian themes, including the love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell in "Two Speak Together" and her poem "The Sisters" which addresses her female poetic predecessors.