Men, Women and Ghosts — Story, Setting & Ideas

Rhythm as Storyteller

Lowell explicitly connects her vers libre technique to music, citing Debussy and Stravinsky. In 'The Cremona Violin,' the violin passages abandon the poem's regular seven-line stanzas for undulating lines meant to produce 'something of the suave, continuous tone of a violin.' The rhythm changes again within those passages, as she notes. A reader can test this by reading aloud: the metrical shifts signal shifts in action or mood. Similarly, 'A Roxbury Garden' uses two distinct movements—circular for a hoop, elliptical for a shuttlecock—to let the poem's shape mirror its subject. These are not decorative choices; they are the primary means of conveying narrative.

Historical Figures in Fragments

The excerpt concerning Napoleon at Malmaison offers a compressed, impressionistic scene. The Emperor is shown wiping his face, hearing a voice he 'does not hear, and yet he hears it all the time.' The prose-poem style uses short, broken sentences: 'Roses! Roses! Swimming above their leaves, rotting beneath them.' A pink rose falls at his feet, and he says, 'Very well. I go.' The passage ends with a gate clicking shut and a whip cracking. Lowell does not explain motives or provide a continuous narrative; she lets sensory details—the light, the dust, the stuffed black swan—carry the emotional weight. The reader must assemble the story from these fragments.

The Shipbuilders' Chorus

'The Hammers' opens with onomatopoeic beats: 'Bang! Bang! Tap! Tap-a-tap! Rap!' The poem chronicles the construction of a ship over four years, with hammers marking time. Lowell weaves in the voices of workmen—Jem Wilson's boasts, Stephen Pibold's song—and the chatter of Sunday visitors. The rhythm of the hammers becomes a heartbeat: 'The tapping goes on like heart-beats in a fever.' The poem's structure mimics the labor it describes: repetitive, percussive, building toward a launch. The reader is placed among the crowd, hearing the 'Bang! Rap! Tap!' as the ship takes shape.

Ghosts in the Details

The title's 'ghosts' are not literal specters but presences felt through absence. In the Malmaison scene, Napoleon is haunted by Josephine's voice; the fallen rose and the empty rooms evoke a lost empire. In 'The Hammers,' the finished ship is never described—only the process of building. The ghost is the vessel yet to sail. Lowell's method is to present surfaces—sounds, colors, movements—and let the reader infer the unseen. The preface warns that some poems treat 'air, clouds, trees, houses, streets' as characters. These are the ghosts: the nonhuman world made animate through rhythm and observation.

Lowell's collection rewards attention to its formal architecture. Read the poems aloud to catch the rhythmic shifts she designed. Notice how she uses repetition, fragmentation, and sensory detail to imply story rather than state it. The historical and domestic scenes are best approached as tone poems: let the sounds and images accumulate before seeking a linear plot.

That rainy afternoon, Amy Lowell’s hoop tracing its circle through Men, Women and Ghosts felt like a quiet pulse—each poem a held breath. The way she let rhythm carry a story reminded me of something older, more formal, so I pulled down Victorian Poetry — Edition Insights. Same impulse, different cage: her freedoms made their constraints oddly tender.