In Amy Lowell's "Fireworks," the speaker dramatizes the rage she feels toward her enemy by tossing out images one might see at a fireworks display.
Lowell’s poem consists of eleven couplets arranged in seven stanzas of 2, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 2 lines, offering a neat symmetry. The subject of hate is, therefore, presented as an ultra-controlled emotion. The fireworks display consists of many shapes and colors, but they are set in an atmosphere of control.
First Stanza Couplet: “You hate me and I hate you”
In the opening couplet, the speaker addresses another person telling that person that they hate each other, but they are polite about it.
Second Stanza: “But whenever I see you, I burst apart”
When two people who hate each other find themselves in each other’s company, they may argue, they may accuse each other of all sorts of atrocities, and they may even come to fisticuffs. The term fireworks is used to express the explosion of emotion that ensues from such rage and contention. Even a dictionary definition of “fireworks” is “a display of violent temper or fierce activity.”
The speaker in Amy Lowell’s “Fireworks” then fuses both definitions of the celebratory display of lights and the emotional display of rage that human beings feel. So when the speaker meets the person she hates, her rage bursts forth like the fireworks that bursts forth on the Fourth of July celebration.
She metaphorically, “burst[s] apart,” and “scatter[s] the sky with [her] blazing heart.” Heart, of course, equals emotion. And when her heart/emotion is so roused “It spits and sparkles in the stars and balls, / Buds into roses – and flares, and falls.”
Third Stanza: “Scarlet buttons, and pale green disks”
The third stanza continues detailing the images of the fireworks that are shooting out from the speaker: “Scarlet buttons, and pale green disks, / Silver spirals and asterisks.”
The shapes of the varied colors are round like buttons; there are spirals and shapes that look like asterisks. They “shoot and tremble,” and their colors of red, green, and silver are contrasted against “mauve and amethyst.”
Fourth Stanza Couplet: “I shine in the windows and light up the trees”
In the fourth stanza which is the second single couplet of the poem, the speaker claims that her fireworks display is so bright that it “shine[s] in the windows and light[s] up the trees.” And then she says that this display comes from her hatred of the person to whom she is speaking.
Fifth and Sixth Stanzas: “And when you meet me, you rend asunder”
In the fifth and sixth stanzas, the speaker describes the “fireworks” display of the addressee when the two meet. “ . . . you rend asunder / And go up in a flaming wonder / Of saffron cubes, and crimson moons.”
Again, the display features colorful shapes, which one might actually view at a celebratory light show: “Golden lozenges and spades / Arrows of malachites and jades.” And as the speaker lit up windows and trees, the addressee “flash[es] in the glossy leaves.”
Seventh Stanza Couplet: Such fireworks as we make, we two!”
The final couplet simply summarizes what has already been asserted: that when the two enemies meet, their hatred produces fireworks.
Another Amy Lowell article: Amy Lowell’s “A Fixed Idea”
