| Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22. | | | | The Middleton Place | | By Amy Lowell |
| | From “Southern April” Charleston, S. C.
WHAT would Francis Jammes, lover of dear dead elegancies, | |
| Say to this place? | |
| France, stately, formal, stepping in red-heeled shoes | |
| Along a river shore. | |
| France walking a minuet between live-oaks waving ghostly fans of Spanish moss. | 5 |
| La Caroline, indeed, my dear Jammes, | |
| With Monsieur Michaux engaged to teach her deportment. | |
| Faint as a whiff of flutes and hautbois, | |
| The great circle of the approach lies beneath the sweeping grasses. | |
| Step lightly down these terraces, they are records of a dream. | 10 |
| Magnolias, pyrus japonicas, azaleas, | |
| Flaunting their scattered blooms with the same bravura | |
| That lords and ladies used in the prison of the Conciergerie. | |
| You were meant to be so gay, so sophisticated, and you are so sad— | |
| Sad as the tomb crouched amid your tangled growth, | 15 |
| Sad as the pale plumes of the Spanish moss | |
| Slowly strangling the live-oak trees. | |
| |
| Sunset wanes along the quiet river, | |
| The afterglow is haunted and nostalgic, | |
| Over the yellow woodland it hangs like the dying chord of a funeral chant; | 20 |
| And evenly, satirically, the mosses move to its ineffable rhythm, | |
| Like the ostrich fans of palsied dowagers | |
| Telling one another contentedly of the deaths they have lived to see. | | | | |
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