Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

Time gets hauled into court here, not as a neutral ticking measure but as an accessory to capitalism: a "joyless emblem" stamped with the "greed of millions". Lowell doesn’t just personify time as a thief; she frames it as a logo, a public-facing symbol that advertises a whole economic order. The exclamation-point opening is a flare shot into the sky, the kind of melodramatic urgency that modern life keeps demanding while pretending urgency is simply practical.

The phrase "greed of millions" is slyly double-edged. It points upward at the titans who turn hours into profit, but it also implicates the crowd. Mass ambition becomes its own machine: everyone chasing advancement, everyone participating, so no one quite feels responsible. Time, in this view, isn’t merely lost; it’s extracted, like labor. Calling it a "robber" makes the theft feel intimate and bodily, as if the best of life is being pickpocketed in plain sight.

Lowell writes as a Modernist in an era when the clock had tightened its grip: industrial schedules, Taylorist efficiency, the new bureaucracy of minutes and deadlines. Even poetry was being rewired by the tempo of cities and machines. Her contempt is not nostalgic softness; it’s a protest against quantification itself. "The best which earth can give" is deliberately broad - not one specific pleasure, but the whole messy, unproductive abundance that can’t be invoiced. The line’s power comes from how it turns a metaphysical abstraction into a cultural indictment: time hurts because we’ve trained it to.