The second volume, _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,_ which came two years later, showed a remarkable advance, and gave its author an enviable position in American literature. An admirable preface reveals three characteristics--reverence for the art of poetry, determination not to be confined to any school, and a refreshingly honest confession of hard labour in learning how to make poems. As old Quarles put it in the plain-spoken seventeenth century, I see no virtues where I smell no sweat. The first poem, which gives its name to the volume, is written in the lively octosyllabics made famous by _Christmas Eve._ The sharpness of her drawings, one of her greatest gifts, is evident in the opening lines: A drifting, April, twilight sky, A wind which blew the puddles dry, And slapped the river into waves That ran and hid among the staves Of an old wharf. A watery light Touched bleak the granite bridge, and white Without the slightest tinge of gold, The city shivered in the cold. Soon the traveller meets a man who takes him to an old room, full of the symbols of poetry-edged weapons, curiously and elegantly wrought together with seeds of poppy. Poems may be divided into two classes, stimulants and sedatives. All books are either dreams, or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words. Tennyson's poetry is mainly soothing, which is what lazy and tired people look for in any form of art, and are disappointed when they do not find it; the poetry of Donne, Browning, Emerson is the sword of the spirit; it is the opposite of an anaesthetic. Hence when readers first meet it, the effect is one of disturbance rather than repose, and they think it cannot be poetry. Yet in this piece of symbolism, which itself is full of beauty, Amy Lowell seems to say that both reveillé and taps are wrought by music--one is as much the legitimate office of poetry as the other. But although she classifies her poems in this volume according to the opening pair of symbols, and although she gives twice as much space to poppies as to swords, her poetry is always more stimulating than soothing. Her poppy seeds won't work; there is not a soporific page in the whole book.