In 1916, Lowell published her masterwork, “Patterns,” a tense, almost frenzied free verse minidrama spoken in first person. The speaker, traumatized by the news that her fiancé has been killed in combat, attends a formal dance. Dressed in the constrictive gown, powdered wig, and jeweled fan of the eighteenth century, she contrasts the natural colors and configurations of daffodils and squills, bulbs that flower in spring. Tears sprung from pent-up emotions parallel the silent shedding of blossoms from a lime tree.
In the poem’s second stanza, the poet enlarges the dual droplets to include a parallel “plashing of waterdrops / In the marble fountain,” a rhythmic “dripping [that] never stops,” symbolic of the grief she will never escape. As though casting off the constraints of fashion and social propriety, she fantasizes about meeting her lover among the hedges. By supplanting a silver and pink gown with the flesh hues of her own body, she envisions a passionate chase in which the man, graced by reflected light from “sword-hilt and buckles,” stumbles after her as though held back by the trappings of military rank. At the climax, complex interweavings of grief and dreamlike seduction are emotionally too much for the speaker to handle, threatening in line 57 to overwhelm the dreamer.
Lowell develops the narrative with romantic plotting in lines 60 through 71. After receiving a standard wartime communication, the speaker begins a rhythmic pacing, replicated in the juxtaposition of short and long lines. Stiffly clad in “correct brocade,” she sees herself upright among the blooms. To dramatize loss, she relives the blessing of sunlight, rhyming “And I answered, ‘It shall be as you have said.’ / Now he is dead.”
Line 91 retreats from past and present to predict the flow of seasons, each with its characteristic flowers and weather. Locked in a prim celibacy, the speaker regrets that war has negated passion. The closing couplet, suited to the charged atmosphere of tumbling emotions, crackles with defiance of the feminine role of mourner and the masculine world that wastes good men in war.
“Madonna of the Evening Flowers,” set at Sevenels and composed in honor of Ada Russell in 1919, is an opulent piece that displays Lowell’s deft verbal abilities. The three-part text moves from simple description to sensuous impressionism. Composed in unrhymed cadence, it draws energy from visual profusion, including oak leaves feathered by the wind and late afternoon sun reflected off mundane objects—books, scissors, and a thimble. From an unassuming domestic still life, the central stanza follows the seeker into a religious vision sanctified by the pure heart of the unnamed “you.” Color and sound mount into a surreal chiming of bell-shaped garden flowers, which enrich the holy setting with connections between their common name, Canterbury bells, with the cathedral and shrine in southeastern England.
The final stanza injects a playful note of miscommunication. The speaker, who stands transfixed by mystic thoughts, discounts the gardener’s mission to assess growth, spray, and prune. Enraptured in wonder, the speaker shuts out sounds to absorb the aura of the gardener, whom the steepled larkspur transforms into the Virgin Mary, traditionally clad in blue as a symbol of devotion. Lowell concludes the poem with a kinesthetic gesture by turning sight into sound; the color and shape of the bell-blossoms evolve into an organ swell, a traditional anthem, a Te Deum ([We praise] thee, God) of worship and adoration.
Similarly majestic, “Venus Transiens” [Venus Crossing Over] (1919), replete with Renaissance awe at female grace, derives its title and drama from Sandro Botticelli’s painting depicting Venus rising from the sea, a mythic birth of beauty out of sea foam. Again, Lowell wreathes her subject in silver and blue, colors that reflect the light of sea and sky. The sands on which the speaker stands anchor her to the real world while the waves and sky uplift her beloved to a sublime, exalted state. The viewer stands apart from subject, as though the human element is permanently distanced from the divine.
