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.
