Amy Lowell

Listen to this text, read by Ken Masters

Over the housetops,

Chimney-pots

British term for terracotta caps on chimneys—Lowell spent years in London. This is an urban, working-class landscape, not pastoral.

Above the rotating chimney-pots,
I have seen a shiver of amethyst,

Amethyst, cinnamon

She's naming colors like a painter mixing pigments. This isn't "purple and brown"—these are specific, material hues.

And blue and cinnamon have flickered
A moment,
At the far end of a dusty street.
Through sheeted rain
Has come a lustre of crimson,
And I have watched moonbeams
Hushed by a film of palest green.

Her wings, Goddess!

The turn: what seemed like weather phenomena was actually a goddess. Lowell delays the reveal for 15 lines.

It was her wings,
Goddess!
Who stepped over the clouds,
And laid her rainbow feathers
Aslant on the currents of the air.
I followed her for long,
With gazing eyes and stumbling feet.
I cared not where she led me,
My eyes were full of colours:
Saffrons, rubies, the yellows of beryls,
And the indigo-blue of quartz;
Flights of rose, layers of chrysoprase,

Chrysoprase, vermilion

Chrysoprase is apple-green chalcedony; vermilion is mercury sulfide. Lowell uses mineralogical and chemical terms, not common color words.

Points of orange, spirals of vermilion,
The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals,
The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas.
I followed,
And watched for the flashing of her wings.
In the city I found her,
The narrow-streeted city.
In the market-place I came upon her,

Bound and trembling

The goddess of color/beauty is literally being sold in a marketplace. The shift from pursuit to captivity happens in one stanza.

Bound and trembling.
Her fluted wings were fastened to her sides with cords,
She was naked and cold,
For that day the wind blew
Without sunshine.
Men chaffered for her,

Chaffered

Archaic term for haggling, bargaining. Men are negotiating her price like livestock.

They bargained in silver and gold,
In copper, in wheat,
And called their bids across the market-place.
The Goddess wept.
Hiding my face I fled,
And the grey wind hissed behind me,
Along the narrow streets.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Lowell's Color Theory

Amy Lowell was an Imagist poet obsessed with precision. Notice she doesn't write "purple" or "red"—she writes amethyst, crimson, saffron, vermilion. These aren't metaphors; they're technical terms. Amethyst is a specific shade of violet quartz. Chrysoprase is apple-green chalcedony. Vermilion is literally mercury sulfide pigment. She's naming colors the way a painter or jeweler would.

This matters because the poem is about seeing. The speaker follows a goddess through the city tracking flashes of color—"the spotted gold of tiger-lily petals, / The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas." That word loud is doing work: Lowell synesthetically treats color as sound, making visual experience almost overwhelming. The catalog of hues (saffrons, rubies, beryls, quartz, rose, chrysoprase, orange, vermilion) builds like a crescendo.

The precision collapses at the end. When the goddess is captured and sold, the world becomes grey. The final line—"the grey wind hissed behind me"—is the only moment without color. The loss of beauty is literal: the spectrum vanishes from the poem's vocabulary.

The Marketplace

The goddess isn't abstract—she's naked, cold, bound with cords. Men are bidding on her "in silver and gold, / In copper, in wheat." This is a slave auction. Lowell wrote this around 1914, and the image of a beautiful, powerless woman sold to male bidders isn't subtle.

[CONTEXT: Lowell was openly lesbian in an era when that meant social exile. She lived with actress Ada Dwyer Russell for over a decade in what was called a "Boston marriage." Her work frequently explores women trapped by male power structures.]

The speaker's response matters: "Hiding my face I fled." She doesn't rescue the goddess. She doesn't bid. She runs away, ashamed. The poem doesn't offer heroism or salvation—just witness and complicity. The speaker spent the whole poem chasing beauty, but when she finds it commodified and suffering, she can only escape.

That narrow-streeted city appears twice. First it's where the speaker finds the goddess; then it's the maze she flees through. The urban landscape that produced those chimney-pot colors becomes a trap. The poem moves from wonder ("I followed her for long") to horror ("The Goddess wept") to cowardice ("I fled"). Beauty doesn't save anyone.