The title poem is an allegory in which a poet visits an old dealer who sells sword blades and poppy seed, the sharp word and the dreaming one. After it come poems of a London thoroughfare at two in the morning, a coal picker, cyclists, convalescence and the precinct at Rochester, along with longer narratives such as the strange romance of Max and Christine.
Lowell’s second collection, the book that announced her turn toward Imagism. Download the free EPUB.