Aged 22

Quiz: Aged 22 by Amy Lowell

1. Recall – Form: What poetic form does Lowell use for all three sonnets in Aged 22, and in which collection did the poem first appear?

1. Recall – Speaker & Subject: Each of the three sonnets in Aged 22 centers on a different figure. Identify all three subjects, in order.

1. Recall – Key Image: What gravestone inscription directly inspired the central image of the first sonnet, and what kind of illness does it allude to?

1. Comprehension – Sonnet 1: In the first sonnet's sestet, what does the phrase "ineradicable race" suggest about the young man's situation, and how does this connect to the poem's broader theme of exile?

1. Recall – Historical Context: Which specific historical work by George Macaulay Trevelyan informed Lowell's portrayal of Francis II in the second sonnet, and what real political event does his downfall represent?

1. Comprehension – Sonnet 2: How does the repeated use of the word "empty" in the second sonnet's sestet function symbolically? What does it reveal about Francis II's legacy?

1. Analysis – Tone: Describe how the tone shifts across the three sonnets. How does Lowell's emotional stance toward each subject differ, and what effect does this variety create within a single poem sequence?

1. Analysis – Symbol: In the third sonnet, Lowell compares Keats's genius to ripe fruit suspended from a slim, twisted tendril. What does this image simultaneously celebrate and warn against, and how does it relate to the poem's overarching theme of youth interrupted?

1. Analysis – The Highroad: What does the symbol of the highroad represent in the Keats sonnet, and how does it shape the relationship Lowell constructs between herself and Keats?

1. Analysis – Biographical Irony: Lowell was 38 years old when Aged 22 was published, yet the sequence focuses intensely on youth and unrealized potential. What tension or irony does this biographical fact introduce into a reading of the poem?

Answer Key

1. Lowell uses the Petrarchan sonnet form; all three appeared in her 1912 debut collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.

1. Sonnet 1: an unnamed young man who died of a tropical illness far from home; Sonnet 2: Francis II, the last Bourbon King of Naples; Sonnet 3: the poet John Keats.

1. The inscription "Stranger's Fever" comes from an actual gravestone and alludes to a lethal tropical illness, likely yellow fever, contracted in a land indifferent to the young man's identity.

1. "Ineradicable race" suggests that the young man could never escape his origins—his bloodline and homeland defined him in ways that travel or circumstance could not erase—linking his death abroad to the poem's theme of displacement and exile.

1. Trevelyan's 1911 history Garibaldi and the Making of Italy informed the sonnet; Francis II's downfall represents the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy in Naples during the Risorgimento of 1861.

1. The word "empty"—applied to both the palace and the quay—symbolizes the total erasure of Francis II's power and significance. He departs leaving nothing behind and carrying nothing away, suggesting his reign has been rendered historically meaningless.

1. The first sonnet is tender and mournful; the second adopts a detached, almost clinical pity for a failed king; the third is warm and reverential toward Keats. This tonal variety prevents the sequence from becoming monotonous and shows that loss takes many emotional shapes.

1. The image of ripe, orbed fruit on a delicate tendril celebrates the richness and fullness of Keats's achievement while simultaneously emphasizing its fragility—the genius was extraordinary but precariously supported, mirroring the poem's central theme that great potential can be cut short at any moment.

1. The highroad represents the shared journey all poets undertake across generations. By imagining Keats as a fellow traveler who walked the same path before her, Lowell collapses historical distance and positions herself as his artistic heir and companion rather than merely his admirer.

1. The irony is that Lowell, writing from the vantage point of middle age, meditates on figures who died or fell from power in their twenties. Her own distance from that youthful threshold may lend the sequence both its elegiac tenderness and its implicit question about what potential she herself had already realized—or left behind.