Petals

Amy Lowell 1874 (Brookline) – 1925 (Brookline)



Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.

Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 17, 2023

27 sec read
102

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCABC DEFDEFGXHGXH
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 507
Words 93
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 6, 12

Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. more…

All Amy Lowell poems | Amy Lowell Books

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