"Vintage" by Amy Lowell

One of the delights of my mornings is reading the "Poem-a-Day" e-mails from the Academy of American Poets. 

The weekday poems are contemporary--poems usually published within the past year. Reading these "cutting edge" poems helps to keep me current in the styles and content of the poems of our time.

The weekend poems, however, are classic poems by poets from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas and everyone in between. Because my taste for poetry is firmly fixed in the 19th century with rare forays into the early 20th century (namely e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, etc.), I delight in these poems, greeting them as old friends.

Often while the poets are familiar, the poems posted are not. Rarely do the weekend offerings include well-known poems; rather, the poems are often as new to me as anything by today's poets.

Such is the case with "Vintage" by Amy Lowell. I don't know a great deal about Lowell except for name recognition from literature classes in 20th century poetry and that she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but I really enjoyed the powerful imagery in this poem and thought I'd share it with you this morning:

Vintage

Amy Lowell, 1874 - 1925

I will mix me a drink of stars,—
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.

It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.

(1914)

I wish you all a lovely week! 

With warm poetic wishes,