I saw this fragment in my poem-of-the-day email: Fragment by Amy Lowell.
What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of colored stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion’s sake.
It reminded me of another poem in a similar style (though a much different time period) that I very much liked as a kid.
Christopher Marlowe from Tamburlaine's Sufferings:
What is beauty saith my sufferings, then
If all the pens that poets ever held
Had fed the feeling of their masters thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their thoughts,
Their minds, their muses, on admired themes:
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy
Wherein, as in a mirror we perceive
The highest reaches of the human wit:
If all these can make one poem's period,
And all combine in beauty's worthiness
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
While Lowell was an imagist and Marlow an Elozabethan, there is a lot in common here. Opening with a question, attributing mystical qualities to art, static meter and rhyme, lots of superlatives, etc.
No particularly interesting analysis here, just something that reminded me of something else.
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