The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered her embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hi-jacking of the movement, and among his friends he referred to her as the \"hippo-poetess\". Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse
Lowell not only published her own work but also that of other writers. According to Untermeyer, she \"captured\" the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter called the American Imagists the \"Amygist\" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry.
Lowell was a short but imposing figure. She smoked cigars constantly, a glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, that she was a \"hippopoetess.\"
The reader's five senses are captivated by lines of imagery as the reader is called to visualize the rose and to smell its \"fragrance.\" The poem describes a stream on which flower petals are placed and float along. Soon into the poem, the reader understands that the flow of the stream is much like the flow of human life over time.
The opening line \"Life is a stream\" takes the reader into a world of comparisons between petals floating on a stream of water and the floating of dreams over the years of life. The deduction that Lowell is comparing the growth of the flower, through bloom, to the life of the human becomes evident in the line \"Petal by petal the flower of our heart.\" \"Heart\" refers to human emotions, and a sadness is felt as Lowell describes petals moving down the stream until they are gone.
The happy tone expressed at the beginning of Petals, describing the early bloom of flowers, becomes forlorn as the poem continues into the second
and final verse. The poem explains that the once-happy start of the life of the flower, alluding to the beginning of the human life, becomes sad over time as petals fall and float away in the stream. Lowell draws comparison between sadness over the flower and the disappointment over lost dreams once as vivid as a beautiful flower.
The dreams which began early in life, at one's bloom, escape from one's hand without being fully realized. Within the rhyming lines, Lowell ponders whether the lost dreams could have been great if they had been acted on. She wistfully writes that \"Their distant employ, we never shall know.\"
Lowell is not only speaking to one person's loss of dreams over the course of one lifespan, but implies by the phrase \"our heart\" that we share the emotional experience of not reaching goals set early in life. Looking back at one's life and seeing what was not fully accomplished is a concept Lowell investigates. Once hopeful and dreamy, these dreams did not come to fruition; the petals float by on the stream \"The end lost in dream.\"
The reader is left with a powerful short line at the poem's end,
\"Fragrance still stays.\" While goals have not reached full potential and this is realized later in life, people retain the positive memories associated with those initial dreams. The memory of early bloom is still kept in one's mind. One has learned from events experienced and finds peace in remembering the early dreams and associated hopefulness.
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