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[T]he On " Opal" Melissa Bradshaw [T]he white Lowell uses to describe the beloved is an erotic ized, kinetic, flashing white. Here is a reminder that white is not the absence of color, but the conjoining of all the visible rays of the spectrum; white is color in extremis, the color of ice, but also the color of molten heat. " In Excess" pictures the beloveds shadow as " sunlight on a plate of silver, " in " Wheat-in-the-Ear" she is a " spear-tongue of white, ceremonial fire, " while in " After a Storm, " she is " more dazzling than the ice flowers" (211, 213). The paradox embedded in this hue what Lowell describes in " The Weather-Cock Points South" as " of no colour, and of all" (211) is best dramatized in " Opal" : You are ice and fire, The touch of you burns my hands like snow. You are cold and flame. You are the crimson of amaryllis, The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you, My heart is a frozen pond Gleaming with agitated torches. (214) " Opals" repetitive pairing of clashing sensory images makes the imagery hard to visualize is slippery and fleeting; " comprehension" hinges on the reader being able to savor, but not necessarily reconcile, the poems paradoxes. The tone, as well, is slippery. Is it euphoric or pained? Does the " narrator rejoice or suffer? Is this a love poem or a grotesque? Appearing exactly halfway through Pictures of the Floating Worlds " Two Speak Together" section, a sequence of forty-two love poems, this brief lyric encapsulates the excesses and tensions found in the rest of the poems.
Whereas the poems preceding " Opal" are ecstatic celebrations of love and intimacy, several of the poems immediately following reflect the beloveds absence, a separation marked by morbidity, fear, and self-doubt. The final image of the narrators heart as a " frozen pond/ Gleaming with agitated torches" is especially telling in this regard as it suggests both rapture and peril: the frozen pond of the speakers heart gleams because it is beginning to melt from the heat of " agitated torches. " From Modernizing Excess: Amy Lowell and the Aesthetics of Camp. Diss. State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000.
Copyright? 2000 by Melissa Bradshaw.
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