Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

A love lyric that refuses to pick a single temperature, Lowell’s line makes desire feel less like a feeling than a physics problem: the beloved is a contradiction you can’t solve, only suffer. “Ice and fire” is an old pairing, but the twist lands in the tactile detail. “The touch of you burns my hands like snow” doesn’t just decorate the paradox; it weaponizes it. Snow can “burn” through numbness, through the sting of cold on skin, and that sensory truth gives the metaphor credibility. The body becomes the lie detector for an affair the mind keeps misreading.

The intent is to capture intimacy as destabilization: attraction that injures precisely because it’s irresistible. “My hands” matters, too. Hands are how we reach, take, hold, make promises real. Lowell frames contact as consequence. You don’t merely think about this person; you grasp them and pay for it.

Subtext: the beloved’s power is their emotional volatility, their ability to be withholding and consuming at once. The speaker is caught between two kinds of pain - the scorch of closeness and the frostbite of distance - and both feel like proof. It’s a line about addiction without the moralizing, a portrait of romantic modernity where longing isn’t noble, it’s disorienting.

Context sharpens it. Lowell, a central figure in early 20th-century Imagism, prized compressed images over Victorian fog. She also wrote frankly about desire at a time when women’s erotic speech - especially queer-coded intimacy - was policed. The paradox becomes a strategy: sensuous, deniable, and unmistakably bodily.