Meeting House Hill

I must be mad, or very tired,
When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track
Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune,
And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square
Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Clear, reticent, superbly final,
With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance,
It dominates the weak trees,
And the shot of its spire
Is cool and candid,
Rising into an unresisting sky.
Strange meeting-house
Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.
I watch the spire sweeping the sky,
I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast
With its royals set full
Straining before a two-reef breeze.
I might be sighting a tea-clipper,
Tacking into the blue bay,
Just back from Canton
With her hold full of green and blue porcelain
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail
Gazing at the white spire
With dull, sea-spent eyes.

by Amy Lowell, 1894-1925

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Sunday 8 was International Women’s Day so I wanted to feature a work by a woman poet whom I had not featured before. American poet, Amy Lowell, was awarded the Pulitzer prize posthumously for her first collection of poetry, What’s O’Clock (1925), which included Meeting House Hill.

I think this is quite a “modern” poem in style, with the straightforward language and concrete images juxtaposed with the “personal” voice of the poet — a good choice, I hope, to bridge the gap between women’s voices in the early twentieth century and today.

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.