How does lowell’s word choice support his theme?
lowell uses words such as “nest,” “lark,” and “songbirds” to inform the reader about birds.
lowell mentions specific birds and uses words such as “passion” to show how slowly life moves.
lowell uses words such as “song-birds,” “passion,” and “impatience” to suggest that life is brief and should be lived passionately.

I've lost the exact quote, but there's a note in Nietzsche somewhere about old

philosophers and their tendency to issue declarations, assertions, without any

supporting arguments or augmentative proofs . . . this practice, he says, always

proceeds not from wisdom but from weariness . . . I think I've reached that decrepit

state, because I find myself impatient with process; I too want to write things that

simply declare, that baldly state conclusions, without my having to create or present

a viable context . . . I try to justify it to myself with the excuse of poetry's necessary

need for brevity, and I can find quotes from the greats to support that pose-stance,

but it's really age that's causing my slack-off . . . I'm 66 years old and I'm exhausted:

every poem in my work-folder is a letter of resignation. A plea for early (too late!)

retirement.

*

When does the President have me scheduled to die from Bird Flu? Not soon enough, I

hear some say.

*

I don't do it much now, but about 4 years ago I read R. S. Thomas everyday for months

on end. You could say I read him religiously, and the pun applies because while I told

myself I was reading him for the trenchant style and the tenacities of his craft,

inevitably I had to contend with the endless metaphors of Christianity that fill his

work: his poems are reiteratively if not exclusively concerned with the spiritual

life. . . . as I read him I grew envious over the wealth of tropes, the seemingly

limitless inscapes of figuration which Christianity provides for his poems. . . He

returns again and again to those traditional interactions and confrontations between

human and deity, and somehow brings the old ciphers if not back to life, at least back

to line. . . . I'm an atheist, I hate religion, but I understand the appeal of it for poets,

i.e. its rich repetoire of associations and subject matter . . . I could see why, in the

absence of other intellectual considerations, a poet might convert to any faith for

poetical reasons alone, never mind salvation. (The extravagant solidities of the

former outweigh the pathetic apparitions of the latter.) If only the choice were that

simple.

Explanation:

Lowell uses words such as “song-birds,” “passion,” and “impatience” to suggest that life is brief and should be lived passionately.

Explanation:

The use of this words in Lowell's poem talks about how fast and volatile the emotions can be and at the same time how intense and necessary they are for the human to feel, a life without these emotions would be a wasted one, then the poem invites people to live and take all the experiences that life can offer with all the passion they have.

“thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.”

“hath taught me to set in trifles no store,”

“me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb.”