Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

Lowell gives hate a body, and it is not human. "Ravening vulture beaks" strips the emotion of any romantic grandeur and recasts it as scavenging hunger: hate doesn’t create so much as it feeds on what’s already dead, already ruined, already made available. The phrasing is surgical. Not a single vulture, but beaks - plural, dismembered, relentless, coming in pieces. Hate is a swarm of appetites, not a coherent ideology. It descends.

The "place of skulls" does double duty. It’s biblical (Golgotha, the execution hill), and it’s archeological: a site where violence has settled into residue. Lowell’s point isn’t only that hate kills; it’s that hate arrives when the killing is effectively done, to pick the bones and make a spectacle of the aftermath. That’s the subtextual insult: hatred is less a force of conviction than an opportunistic parasitism.

As a poet writing in the early 20th century, Lowell is steeped in imagist precision and a modern awareness of mass death; the image anticipates a century defined by mechanized slaughter and the politics that follow it. She also nails a psychological truth: hate often feels righteous to the hater, but from the outside it reads as carrion behavior - noisy, repetitive, and ultimately dependent on devastation it didn’t have the courage to face while it was alive.