Painting at home

When making a painting, one doesn't realize that when stepping back and then to the front, one is analyzing the image, either aesthetically or optically. By aesthetically I mean the voice of the mind that knows about perception, perspective, formal analysis, geometry, and other known formal analysis. Optically would be perceptual analysis of color, shape, form, and material. Even though I had to make this painting based on Amy Lowell's poem "Patterns" I didn't forget my use of style that I always seem to use. Looking closer to the portraits I can see Frida Kahlo's influence on me. I strongly suggest that I should change the background to a more "full" pigment.The more one sits and listens to “Patterns” by Amy Lowell, it becomes a poem of many concepts. As she writes a romantic story from the point of view of a woman, she invites the reader to imagine the life of that late 1800’s lady. The social conditions for this lady are constraining her in way that she feels she has to rely on a man, that she is in love with, to free her from a torturous life. The reader can choose to believe that the narrator is Amy herself since in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the bibliography states that she lived with actress Ada Dwyer who inspired many of her poems. Therefore one can believe that Lowell is writing about the beauty and hate she feels towards lesbians. If looking at the many restraints created in this poem we could infer that Lowell was referring to the restraints classicism and neoclassicism have built. By expressing her sexual desires in this poem Lowell might be rebelling against these movements. We shall look at the poem closer in this essay and find that Amy plays with imagery and emotions.
Lowell is a very descriptive writer and as she narrates about the garden of daffodils and squills I see a brilliant arrangement of colors that is gradually lost when the brocaded gown is mentioned. As she sinks on a seat in the shade under a lime tree I quickly visualize a sad and negative state. The stiff brocaded gown becomes a harsh underlying meaning, a border that she creates between nature and the freedom-less life of this woman. As we follow the imagery given of daffodils we see that they are blowing and “fluttering in the breeze” and do not have an arranged pattern. We see the dress leaving behind a pink and silver stain on the gravel that becomes a metaphor in itself as aa current plate of fashion that brings pressure and imprisonment to a woman. This imagery of a rich and stiff dress becomes very uncomfortable and a negative effect to our narrator as she falls onto a lime-tree. On this shady tree is where she falls into a nostalgic state where she remembers good times with her lover and how he would have said that sunlight carried a blessing.
The poem is written in irregular forms, meaning that it uses rhyme and meter but will not follow a pattern. There is also no sequence in the number of stanza’s used. Lowell breaks away from the poetic forms of her time, but she uses certain traditional techniques: is to be found on line 26 and 27, on page 1246 in blossom and bosom:
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.
As we see on line 59, again blossom and bosom are mentioned as a rhythm but it doesn’t work as a rhetorical repetition. It creates a mind of remembrance and how one looses track of the story by a minor sidetrack but comes back to the story by remembering where one left off. In a way I like this poem because it wisely chooses when to use metaphors.
In conclusion we have not answered why Amy mentions the scene of a woman bathing in a marble basin, but we have found that her poem makes little use of traditional meter and rhyme. As she concludes that the pattern is called war she brings hate against these rules given to society and she as an example of what war has caused. She is unable to be loved, and as she walks up and down her garden she is re-living the day she was to be married. In a way Lowell’s poem is similar to Sappho’s writing because they both center on passion and love for various genders. They are both intimate and have a lyric voice.