Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

Lowell turns the moon into a hard, bright authority figure: not a gentle night-light but a cold deity you kneel to because you can’t argue with it. “Moon! Moon!” is less serenade than summons, the kind of repetition that sounds like obsession tipping into prayer. Then she goes bodily: “I am prone before you.” It’s not romantic yearning from a distance; it’s submission, the speaker flattened under an emotion that feels bigger than human scale.

The perversely brilliant move is the request itself. “Pity me” sounds like a familiar plea, but Lowell doesn’t ask for comfort. She asks to be “drench[ed]…in loneliness,” making solitude something liquid, immersive, almost punitive. Loneliness becomes a baptism that doesn’t cleanse; it consecrates suffering. The subtext is desire that can’t be resolved into a tidy object. The moon stands in for what’s unreachable and impersonal: a witness that sees everything and responds with nothing. That’s why it’s safe to beg it and humiliating at the same time.

Context matters: Lowell, a leading Imagist, specialized in sharp, tactile intensities rather than vague sentiment. She was also writing in a culture that often required queer desire and nonconforming longing to speak sideways, through symbols, weather, and the cosmos. The moon’s beauty is indifferent; that indifference is the point. She isn’t asking to be saved. She’s staging how longing can become its own ritual, a chosen exposure to the very thing that hurts.