Explore the poem

Amy Lowell’s sonnet begins with the speaker presenting a picture of a life that is full of monotony and drudgery. Her days are ‘shapeless’ and covered in ‘dust’. One day is almost indistinguishable from another and her actions appear mechanical and repetitive as she sifts and sorts a joyless life. Notice how there is something almost scientific and cold about the diction, with references to ‘atoms’ and ‘particles’. She compares her actions to those of a monk counting prayers on a rosary with movements that are repeated time and time again.

However, in the ninth line, which often represents a change of direction in sonnets, the poet recollects a very different time of passion and excitement. The poem is now full of references to ‘joy’ and ‘fire’, ‘wine’ and ‘desire’; to a time of ‘glory’.

In the final couplet the speaker reflects that she did not make the most of the days that pulsed with energetic life. What has she failed to ‘understand’, as she puts it, in the final word of the sonnet?

About Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell was born into an affluent Massachusetts family and educated at home and in private schools in Boston. Her financial resources helped her develop a liberated and unconventional lifestyle.

Amy Lowell once remarked that God had made her a businesswoman and she had made herself a poet. Over a relatively brief period she produced over 650 poems but also worked energetically to publicise and promote modern trends in poetry. In particular, she embraced imagism within the Modernist movement, and in 1914 became friends with Ezra Pound, one of its leading proponents. Lowell edited a number of collections of imagist poetry.

She published extensively between 1915 and her death in 1925. She lectured, promoted the work of other poets she admired and wrote literary criticism, including a lengthy biography of John Keats. Lowell received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1925 for her collection of poems What’s O’Clock.