http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=133157906...

The poem "Patterns" by Amy Lowell is found in Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology", which was the 1916 publication of the journal Some Imagist Anthologies. The poem is from the point of view of a young woman who has just been informed of her fiance's death in the war. There are several parallels between the speaker's emotions and those described by Vera Brittain after Roland's death. The speaker expresses that she will never be able to be loved by another man after this, saying: "And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace/ By each button, hook and lace./ For the man who should loose me is dead". This reinforces the notion that Buck raised in her article about how wartime poetry "reiterating a version of femininity rooted in home front experiences of waiting and mourning" (89). Lowell's poem exemplifies this notion: the speaker is not a strong woman working for her country but instead a mourning woman who spends her days waiting for bad news.

An interesting aspect of this poem is the pacifist message with which is leaves the reader. The speaker focuses on the pattern of her brocade dress and the individuality of her body within it, and ends the poem by saying her man died "Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,/ In a pattern called a war./ Christ! What are patterns for?". It seems that she is speaking out against the senseless deaths experienced during the war by focusing on the emotional turmoil experienced by just one woman, but also acknowledges that these feelings a pattern happening all throughout the world. This line transforms the speaker from a simple grieving woman to someone questioning the very concept of war. She seems to be wondering, what is the point of so many women feeling like this? Why is this a pattern in our lives when we should instead all have what we want and what we plan for ourselves?