Peace!

Quiz: PEACE! by Amy Lowell

1. Recall – Form & Structure: PEACE! is not a single poem but a collection. How many poems does it contain, and what are their titles?

1. Recall – Speaker & Tone: How does the tone shift across the four poems in the collection, and which poem is identified as the angriest piece in the set?

1. Recall – Key Image: In The Bombardment, what object belonging to the old woman shatters and produces an initial image of violence entering a domestic space?

1. Recall – Key Image: In Lead Soldiers, what porcelain figure sits on the nursery bookcase and silently observes Tommy throughout the poem? What does this figure symbolize?

1. Comprehension – Symbolism: Explain what Tommy's toy soldiers represent in Lead Soldiers. Why is the metal they are made from significant to Lowell's anti-war argument?

1. Comprehension – Narrative Detail: In The Painter on Silk, what happens to the craftsman on the day of conquest, and what does his fate suggest about the relationship between war and art?

1. Comprehension – Structural Effect: The rain appears at both the opening and the closing of The Bombardment. What quality does Lowell give the rain, and what does its presence at both points of the poem suggest about war and human suffering?

1. Analysis – Poetic Technique: In Lead Soldiers, Lowell employs a nursery-rhyme rhythm and cheerful singsong verses alongside deeply disturbing content. What effect does this contrast create, and what broader argument does it support?

1. Analysis – Historical Context: PEACE! was published in 1916, before the United States entered World War I. How does Lowell's position as an outside observer, combined with her Imagist principles, shape the way she presents the horrors of war in this collection?

1. Analysis – Theme: The collection has been described as dismantling every romantic notion of combat. Using at least two poems from the collection and two symbols identified in the analysis, explain how Lowell argues that war destroys civilization rather than defending it.

Answer Key

1. The collection contains four poems: The Bombardment, Lead Soldiers, The Painter on Silk, and A Ballad of Footmen.

1. The tone shifts from cold and cinematic (The Bombardment), to warmly playful curdling into something unsettling (Lead Soldiers), to quiet and elegiac (The Painter on Silk), and finally to direct, exasperated anger (A Ballad of Footmen), which is identified as the angriest piece.

1. The Bohemian glass — century-old heirlooms inherited from her father — shatters and spills a crimson, blood-red color, marking the first intrusion of violence into a domestic, civilized setting.

1. A nodding porcelain mandarin sits on the bookcase. It symbolizes ancient wisdom and a weary foreknowledge of how the story of war always ends — it watches with mechanical, patient awareness of what Tommy cannot yet understand.

1. The toy soldiers represent how war is packaged and sold attractively — bright colors hide their toxic nature, just as propaganda conceals war's true cost. Lead is a soft, poisonous metal, suggesting that what appears appealing is in fact deadly and corrupt.

1. The painter dies on the day of conquest, still wishing he could render the sound of bugles as roses on silk. His death signals that the forces of war actively destroy the conditions — peace, time, beauty — that make art possible.

1. The rain falls "slowly and without force" throughout the entire bombardment, indifferent to destruction and death alike. Its return at the poem's close suggests that the natural world (and by extension history) is unmoved by human tragedy — war claims lives while the world continues on without pause or mourning.

1. The cheerful nursery-rhyme rhythm lulls readers into a false sense of comfort, then makes the violent content — soldiers boasting of killing and conquest — all the more shocking. This mirrors how propaganda and cultural conditioning present war as exciting and glorious to civilians, especially children, masking its true brutality.

1. As an American observer, Lowell views the war with horror but also with a degree of analytical distance, allowing her controlled rage to come through in precise, concrete images (consistent with Imagist principles) rather than sentimental abstraction. She shows rather than tells — depicting a child mistaking fire for a flower — making the devastation viscerally real without resorting to romantic or patriotic framing.

1. Answers will vary but should draw on at least two of the following: In The Bombardment, the cathedral (symbol of sacred communal civilization) and the Bohemian glass (symbol of generational beauty and memory) are both destroyed, showing that war erases what humanity has built over centuries. In Lead Soldiers, the roses associated with the mandarin and beauty are replaced by pools of blood, and the lead soldiers (symbol of war's deceptive marketing) reveal that civilization is complicit in its own destruction by glamorizing combat. Together, these poems argue that war does not protect civilization — it systematically annihilates it.