Red Slippers
Red slippers in a shop-window, and outside in the street, flaws of grey,windy sleet!
Behind the polished glass, the slippers hang in long threads of red,festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyesof passers-by with dripping colour, jamming their crimson reflectionsagainst the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmoninto the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lightsupon the tops of umbrellas.
The row of white, sparkling shop fronts is gashed and bleeding,it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light,fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain - and freeze again to red slippers,myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window.
They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer;they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers suckedin a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds,flared and burnished by red rockets.
Snap, snap, they are cracker-sparks of scarlet in the white, monotonousblock of shops.
They plunge the clangour of billions of vermilion trumpetsinto the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement.
People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window, farther down,is a big lotus bud of cardboard whose petals open every few minutesand reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair,lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.
One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before?
The flaws of grey, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are onlyred slippers.
II
Thompson's Lunch Room - Grand Central Station
Study in Whites
Wax-white -Floor, ceiling, walls.Ivory shadowsOver the pavementPolished to cream surfacesBy constant sweeping.The big room is coloured like the petalsOf a great magnolia,And has a patinaOf flower bloomWhich makes it shine dimlyUnder the electric lamps.Chairs are ranged in rowsLike sepia seedsWaiting fulfilment.The chalk-white spot of a cook's capMoves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall -Dull chalk-white striking the retina like a blowThrough the wavering uncertainty of steam.Vitreous-white of glasses with green reflections,Ice-green carboys, shifting - greener, bluer - with the jar of moving water.Jagged green-white bowls of pressed glassRearing snow-peaks of chipped sugarAbove the lighthouse-shaped castorsOf grey pepper and grey-white salt.Grey-white placards: 'Oyster Stew, Cornbeef Hash, Frankfurters':Marble slabs veined with words in meandering lines.Dropping on the white counter like horn notesThrough a web of violins,The flat yellow lights of oranges,The cube-red splashes of apples,In high plated `epergnes'.The electric clock jerks every half-minute:'Coming! - Past!''Three beef-steaks and a chicken-pie,'Bawled through a slide while the clock jerks heavily.A man carries a china mug of coffee to a distant chair.Two rice puddings and a salmon saladAre pushed over the counter;The unfulfilled chairs open to receive them.A spoon falls upon the floor with the impact of metal striking stone,And the sound throws across the roomSharp, invisible zigzagsOf silver.
III
An Opera House
Within the gold square of the proscenium arch,A curtain of orange velvet hangs in stiff folds,Its tassels jarring slightly when someone crosses the stage behind.Gold carving edges the balconies,Rims the boxes,Runs up and down fluted pillars.Little knife-stabs of goldShine out whenever a box door is opened.Gold clustersFlash in soft explosionsOn the blue darkness,Suck back to a point,And disappear.Hoops of goldCircle necks, wrists, fingers,Pierce ears,Poise on headsAnd fly up above them in coloured sparkles.Gold!Gold!The opera house is a treasure-box of gold.Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit:Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas;Gold - spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-goldOf harps.The conductor raises his baton,The brass blares outCrass, crude,Parvenu, fat, powerful,Golden.Rich as the fat, clapping hands in the boxes.Cymbals, gigantic, coin-shaped,Crash.The orange curtain partsAnd the prima-donna steps forward.One note,A drop: transparent, iridescent,A gold bubble,It floats . . . floats . . .And bursts against the lips of a bank presidentIn the grand tier.
IV
Afternoon Rain in State Street
Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls,Slant lines of black rainIn front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.Below,Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal,The street.And over it, umbrellas,Black polished dotsStruck to whiteAn instant,Stream in two flat linesSlipping past each other with the smoothness of oil.Like a four-sided wedgeThe Custom House TowerPokes at the low, flat sky,Pushing it farther and farther up,Lifting it away from the house-tops,Lifting it in one piece as though it were a sheet of tin,With the lever of its apex.The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely,Scratching lines of black wire across it,Mutilating its perpendicular grey surfaceWith the sharp precision of tools.The city is rigid with straight lines and angles,A chequered table of blacks and greys.Oblong blocks of flatnessCrawl by with low-geared engines,And pass to short upright squaresShrinking with distance.A steamer in the basin blows its whistle,And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings,A narrow, level bar of steel.Hard cubes of lemonSuperimpose themselves upon the fronts of buildingsAs the windows light up.But the lemon cubes are edged with anglesUpon which they cannot impinge.Up, straight, down, straight - square.Crumpled grey-white papersBlow along the side-walks,Contorted, horrible,Without curves.A horse steps in a puddle,And white, glaring water spurts upIn stiff, outflaring lines,Like the rattling stems of reeds.The city is heraldic with angles,A sombre escutcheon of argent and sableAnd countercoloured bends of rainHung over a four-square civilization.When a street lamp comes out,I gaze at it for fully thirty secondsTo rest my brain with the suffusing, round brilliance of its globe.
V
An Aquarium
Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,Silver shiftings,Rings veering out of rings,Silver - gold -Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,With sharp white bubblesShooting and dancing,Flinging quickly outward.Nosing the bubbles,Swallowing them,Fish.Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,The light rippling over themIn steel-bright tremors.Outspread translucent finsFlute, fold, and relapse;The threaded light prints through them on the pebblesIn scarcely tarnished twinklings.Curving of spotted spines,Slow up-shifts,Lazy convolutions:Then a sudden swift straighteningAnd darting below:Oblique grey shadowsAthwart a pale casement.Roped and curled,Green man-eating eelsSlumber in undulate rhythms,With crests laid horizontal on their backs.Barred fish,Striped fish,Uneven disks of fish,Slip, slide, whirl, turn,And never touch.Metallic blue fish,With fins wide and yellow and swayingLike Oriental fans,Hold the sun in their belliesAnd glow with light:Blue brilliance cut by black bars.An oblong pane of straw-coloured shimmer,Across it, in a tangent,A smear of rose, black, silver.Short twists and upstartings,Rose-black, in a setting of bubbles:Sunshine playing between red and black flowersOn a blue and gold lawn.Shadows and polished surfaces,Facets of mauve and purple,A constant modulation of values.Shaft-shaped,With green bead eyes;Thick-nosed,Heliotrope-coloured;Swift spots of chrysolite and coral;In the midst of green, pearl, amethyst irradiations.
Outside,A willow-tree flickersWith little white jerks,And long blue wavesRise steadily beyond the outer islands.
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.