Amy Lowell

"The Pike"

This poem seems to be written according the specifications of the Imagist style.  It creates an image, captures a moment in time, and it does so without sentimentality.  This is reminiscent of Japanese haiku. However, this poem is more emphatic than haiku; a haiku that rephrases and then repeats itself.  Lowell chose a very straight-forward and simple use of language with no word games or phonetic embellishments.  This is a very masculine style of writing; without frills and romance.  The poem simply describes the motions of the natural world like a nature documentary.  She describes seeing a fish lying dormant and hidden beneath the reeds which stirs as if startled and bolts across the pool.  The emphasis is on the colors and the light;
"In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,"
-and-
"Out from under the reeds
Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun-thickened water."

Lowell certainly achieves her image; for me it appears like an impressionist painting of a mid-day at the lake.  Like so many art and literature movements, Imagism seems to me like conformity for non-conformity's sake.  However, this style certainly seems to have influenced other writers since it began.  Poetry moved away from the romance and the melancholy of the Victorian and lost its favored themes which often manifested in quixotic odes to love lost.  Instead, we prefer the down-to-earth, the self-sufficient, and the privilege simply to be.