Amy Lowell

Charleston. South Carolina

Fifteen years / forty-year growth

Lowell compresses timescales to show how quickly modernization erases history. Fifteen years of development destroy what took forty years to accumulate naturally.

Fifteen years is not a long time,
But long enough to build a city over and destroy it.

Fifteen years / forty-year growth

Lowell compresses timescales to show how quickly modernization erases history. Fifteen years of development destroy what took forty years to accumulate naturally.

Fifteen years / forty-year growth

Lowell compresses timescales to show how quickly modernization erases history. Fifteen years of development destroy what took forty years to accumulate naturally.

Long enough to clean a forty-year growth of grass from between cobblestones,
And run street-car lines straight across the heart of romance.

Street-car lines / heart of romance

Public transportation infrastructure is literally cutting through the city's aesthetic character. This is specific technology, not abstract progress.

Commerce, are you worth this?

Commerce / legal trial

Lowell frames economic development as a defendant in court—'Prosperity versus Beauty' is a real case she wants to prosecute. This legalistic language makes the conflict concrete.

I should like to bring a case to trial:
Prosperity versus Beauty,

Commerce / legal trial

Lowell frames economic development as a defendant in court—'Prosperity versus Beauty' is a real case she wants to prosecute. This legalistic language makes the conflict concrete.

Cash registers teetering

The verb 'teetering' suggests registers are unstable, about to fall—they're not winning this balance, they're barely holding on. Notice she doesn't say they're outweighing beauty; they're precariously balanced.

Cash registers teetering in a balance against the comfort of the soul.
Then, to-night, I stood looking through a grilled gate

Grilled gate / dark garden

The speaker can only observe this beauty through a barrier. The garden is locked away, inaccessible—a symbol of how old Charleston is being preserved behind walls, not lived in.

Grilled gate / dark garden

The speaker can only observe this beauty through a barrier. The garden is locked away, inaccessible—a symbol of how old Charleston is being preserved behind walls, not lived in.

At an old, dark garden.
Live-oak trees dripped branchfuls of leaves over the wall,
Acacias waved dimly beyond the gate, and the smell of their blossoms
Puffed intermittently through the wrought-iron scrollwork.
Challenge and solution—
O loveliness of old, decaying, haunted things!

Decaying, haunted things

Lowell explicitly values deterioration and ghostliness over newness. This is her aesthetic argument: beauty requires age, loss, and incompleteness.

Shamefully paved

The streets are 'shamefully' paved—as if their poor condition is something to be proud of, not embarrassed about. She's inverting the logic of urban improvement.

Little streets untouched, shamefully paved,
Full of mist and fragrance on this rainy evening.
"You should come at dawn," said my friend,
"And see the orioles, and thrushes, and mocking- birds
In the garden."
"Yes," I said absent-mindedly,
And remarked the sharp touch of ivy upon my hand which rested against the wall.
But I thought to myself,
There is no dawn here, only sunset,

No dawn here, only sunset

The speaker rejects her friend's invitation to see the garden at dawn (renewal, hope, birds). She chooses evening and rain instead—a deliberate choice of decline and melancholy over optimism.

No dawn here, only sunset

The speaker rejects her friend's invitation to see the garden at dawn (renewal, hope, birds). She chooses evening and rain instead—a deliberate choice of decline and melancholy over optimism.

And an evening rain scented with flowers.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Modernization as Erasure

Lowell wrote this poem around 1914, when American cities were rapidly transforming through streetcar expansion and commercial development. Charleston, historically one of America's most important ports, was being remade into a modern city. The repetition of the entire poem—lines 1-8 return exactly as lines 29-36—isn't accident; it's structural emphasis. By repeating the opening argument, Lowell insists we can't move past the problem: commerce has already won.

The poem's central conflict isn't sentimental nostalgia. Lowell uses precise, material language: 'street-car lines,' 'cash registers,' 'forty-year growth of grass.' She's documenting what modernization actually does—it doesn't improve beauty, it replaces it with infrastructure. The legal metaphor ('bring a case to trial') is crucial: she's treating this as a real dispute with winners and losers, not a natural or inevitable process.

The Locked Garden as Argument

The poem's emotional center is the grilled gate—a barrier between the speaker and the old garden. Notice what Lowell does here: she doesn't describe the garden directly, only what leaks through the gate. 'Live-oak trees dripped branchfuls of leaves over the wall. / Acacias waved dimly beyond the gate, and the smell of their blossoms / Puffed intermittently through the wrought-iron scrollwork.' The sensory details are fragmentary, incomplete, filtered. This is how modernization preserves beauty: by locking it away, making it a tourist attraction rather than lived experience.

The final lines are devastating precisely because they're quiet. When her friend suggests visiting at dawn to see birds, the speaker deflects—'absent-mindedly'—and then makes her real choice: 'There is no dawn here, only sunset.' She's not lamenting lost potential; she's accepting decline as the poem's actual subject. The evening rain 'scented with flowers' is her alternative to progress. Lowell argues that beauty isn't about newness or improvement; it's about accepting loss, decay, and the particular fragrance of things ending.