This week’s poem is chosen to mark Weston’s Open Gardens weekend where keen gardeners allow visitors to enjoy the wonderful work they have done.

I own a solace shut within my heart,
A garden full of many a quaint delight
Amy Lowell (1874—1925)

Poem 327. Behind a Wall

I own a solace shut within my heart,
A garden full of many a quaint delight
And warm with drowsy, poppied sunshine; bright,
Flaming with lilies out of whose cups dart
Shining things
With powdered wings.

Here terrace sinks to terrace, arbors close
The ends of dreaming paths; a wanton wind
Jostles the half-ripe pears, and then, unkind,
Tumbles a-slumber in a pillar rose,
With content
Grown indolent.

By night my garden is o’erhung with gems
Fixed in an onyx setting. Fireflies
Flicker their lanterns in my dazzled eyes.
In serried rows I guess the straight, stiff stems
Of hollyhocks
Against the rocks.

So far and still it is that, listening,
I hear the flowers talking in the dawn;
And where a sunken basin cuts the lawn,
Cinctured with iris, pale and glistening,
The sudden swish
Of a waking fish.

Amy Lowell’s evocative poem is about a garden, perhaps a memory or a dream because she starts by telling us that this place is “a solace shut within my heart”—it is something that soothes her when she feels the need. It is clearly a place that is very dear to her since she can picture it in almost photographic detail.

The first stanza shows us this garden on a bright summer’s day with the poppies’ lethargic scent and the lilies attracting “Shining things/With powdered wings” to feast on their pollen.

The next stanza displays a bit more of the landscape: terraces, arbours at the ends of lazily winding paths and the wind stirring the fruit on the trees and the roses on the pillars—I imagine them twining thickly around obelisks and nodding gently—“With content/Grown indolent.”

She shows us the garden by night in the third stanza: the initial impression of colourful jewels set against the dark background of night is given by clouds of fireflies circling, and we can just make out the ranks “Of hollyhocks/Against the rocks.”

The last stanza gives us an aural impression of this special space: the undisturbed dawn air in which the flowers seem to be murmuring to one another and the small pool bordered with pallid irises whence we hear the sudden splash as a fish cuts through the water.

I am not a keen gardener and what little I do tends to be more functional than decorative but the place that’s described here sounds marvellous—a secret bower where the poet can indulge a fantasy of an endless summer day or a cool night lit by the fireflies. Wouldn’t it be lovely to stray in such a garden, to sit in one of those concealed arbours and read, or to sip a glass of wine as we admire the view while being profoundly glad not to have to maintain it!

I like it because it paints such a wonderful picture of a garden that clearly brought the poet comfort when she needed it.

A Garden Full of Many a Quaint Delight

Poem 327. Behind a Wall

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