Eleven poems by William Carlos Williams:
1. The Red Wheelbarrow
2. Poem
3. The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
4. To Waken An Old Lady
5. Pastoral
6. Prelude to Winter
7. Proletarian Portrait
8. Yound Sycamore
9. Fine Work with Pitch and Copper
10. The Sparrow
11. This is Just to Say – with a critique by Geoff Page
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
William Carlos Williams
Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
William Carlos Williams
The Widow’s Lament In Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
William Carlos Williams
To Waken An Old Lady
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind—
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested—
the snow
is covered with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.
William Carlos Williams
Pastoral
The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.
Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
These things
astonish me beyond words.
William Carlos Williams
Prelude to Winter
The moth under the eaves
with wings like
the bark of a tree, lies
symmetrically still—
And love is a curious
soft-winged thing
unmoving under the eaves
when the leaves fall.
William Carlos Williams
Proletarian Portrait
A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron
Her hair slicked back standing
on the street
One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk
Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it
She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail
That has been hurting her
William Carlos Williams
Young Sycamore
I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its height—
and then
dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sides—
hung with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top
William Carlos Williams
Fine Work with Pitch and Copper
Now they are resting
in the fleckless light
separately in unison
like the sacks
of sifted stone stacked
regularly by twos
about the flat roof
ready after lunch
to be opened and strewn
The copper in eight
foot strips has been
beaten lengthwise
down the center at right
angles and lies ready
to edge the coping
One still chewing
picks up a copper strip
and runs his eye along it
William Carlos Williams
The Sparrow
(To My Father)
This sparrow
who comes to sit at my window
is a poetic truth
more than a natural one.
His voice,
his movements,
his habits—
how he loves to
flutter his wings
in the dust—
all attest it;
granted, he does it
to rid himself of lice
but the relief he feels
makes him
cry out lustily—
which is a trait
more related to music
than otherwise.
Wherever he finds himself
in early spring,
on back streets
or beside palaces,
he carries on
unaffectedly
his amours.
It begins in the egg,
his sex genders it:
What is more pretentiously
useless
or about which
we more pride ourselves?
It leads as often as not
to our undoing.
The cockerel, the crow
with their challenging voices
cannot surpass
the insistence
of his cheep!
Once
at El Paso
toward evening,
I saw—and heard!—
ten thousand sparrows
who had come in from
the desert
to roost. They filled the trees
of a small park. Men fled
(with ears ringing!)
from their droppings,
leaving the premises
to the alligators
who inhabit
the fountain. His image
is familiar
as that of the aristocratic
unicorn, a pity
there are not more oats eaten
nowadays
to make living easier
for him.
At that,
his small size,
keen eyes,
serviceable beak
and general truculence
assure his survival—
to say nothing
of his innumerable
brood.
Even the Japanese
know him
and have painted him
sympathetically,
with profound insight
into his minor
characteristics.
Nothing even remotely
subtle
about his lovemaking.
He crouches
before the female,
drags his wings,
waltzing,
throws back his head
and simply—
yells! The din
is terrific.
The way he swipes his bill
across a plank
to clean it,
is decisive.
So with everything
he does. His coppery
eyebrows
give him the air
of being always
a winner—and yet
I saw once,
the female of his species
clinging determinedly
to the edge of
a water pipe,
catch him
by his crown-feathers
to hold him
silent,
subdued,
hanging above the city streets
until
she was through with him.
What was the use
of that?
She hung there
herself,
puzzled at her success.
I laughed heartily.
Practical to the end,
it is the poem
of his existence
that triumphed
finally;
a wisp of feathers
flattened to the pavement,
wings spread symmetrically
as if in flight,
the head gone,
the black escutcheon of the breast
undecipherable,
an effigy of a sparrow,
a dried wafer only,
left to say
and it says it
without offense,
beautifully;
This was I,
a sparrow.
I did my best;
farewell.
William Carlos Williams
This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
A Critique of “This is Just to Say” by Geoff Page
This famous, some would say infamous, poem was first published in the mid-1930s. At that time, already in his fifties, William Carlos Williams, fulltime doctor and energetic poet of Rutherford, New Jersey, was just beginning to emerge from the obscurity to which his ‘anti-poetic’ style had condemned him. By the end of his life, in 1963, he would be the recipient of many honours and remain an important influence on American poetry (and on poetry in English generally) for decades afterwards.
At a distance now of seventy years it is interesting to consider just exactly what makes these 28 words a ‘poem’. For those brought up on Keats or Wordsworth (or even Pope and Swift) ‘This Is Just To Say’ seems to be a catalogue of absences: no rhyme, no meter, no ‘beautiful vocabulary’, no sense of transcendence, no ‘poetic’ landscape — not even the attack on society’s shortcomings we might have had from Pope or Swift. It’s no wonder that many readers thought at first that Williams was ‘putting them on’, that he was satirising poetry as it had been previously understood.
In fact, however, Williams had a different agenda. He wanted to make poetry out of the particular, everyday circumstances in which he lived as a husband, father and doctor in Rutherford. He didn’t think it was necessary to revisit Greek mythology for his themes or to rhapsodise about exotic landscapes with nightingales to give ‘atmosphere’. He lived right in the middle of an industrial landscape and, like his friends the painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, he saw a strange beauty and great potential in such material for his art.
The poem starts by wasting no time. The title is, in effect, the first line — a device that was to be much imitated later. It is also a rather open, incomplete statement which implies that the poem is going to be, at one level at least, something of a ‘statement’, even an ars poetica. The poet is going to say that a short, written apology to one’s wife can be as much material for a poem as the most beautiful vista in England’s Lake Country or a glittering view of the Mediterranean.
As is suitable to his theme, Williams uses only the most simple vocabulary — words with which even a kindergarten child would be familiar. He also employs a rhythm which is close to, but not identical with, the patterns of everyday speech. Walt Whitman, with his long, quasi-biblical lines, had beaten Williams to free verse by some sixty years but Williams was to give this staple of American poetry his own twist. The idea was to release the poem bit by bit, in short lines, so that each component could be considered and savoured — almost like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. Though he was also fond of enjambement, Williams also wanted us to consider each line as a unit. Thus we start with ‘I have eaten’, then, line by line, what has been eaten and where it was found. In this kind of poetry such specifics are important. The plums were in the icebox, being saved for something.
Then we go on to a new stanza for the realisation that the poet has broken a mild taboo and committed a considerable selfishness. His wife will, quite reasonably, be a little put out (especially, if he doesn’t apologise). In the third stanza he asks for forgiveness which he hopes will come, at least partly, through her understanding of how enjoyable the experience was: ‘they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold’.
The lineation is important throughout but never more so than in the last stanza. We need a whole line each to reflect on how ‘sweet’ and how ‘cold’ those plums were (and, perhaps, to realise they would not have been as enjoyable if they were sweet and warm). Clearly too, we need a whole line for the important request (demand?) ‘Forgive me’.
Some readers, at this stage, might say ‘Well, that’s all very well, but there’s no rhyme — and where’s the rhythm? Isn’t rhythm essential to poetry?’ One of the great advantages of free verse is its capacity to emphasise key syllab
les by skipping over quite large numbers of unstressed syllables in between. Thus we have in the first stanza: ‘I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox’. Notice how all the most meaningful syllables are stressed and what a long run of unstressed syllables there is until we land, almost triumphantly, on ‘ice’. The same thing happens in the last stanza: ‘Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold’. Williams is asking his wife, Floss, to ‘give’ him something. He is onomatopoetically suggesting the lusciousness of the plums with the sound ‘lish’ and then landing forcefully on the key adjectives ‘sweet’ and ‘cold’.
Even though ‘This Is Just To Say’, with its subtle use of both lineation and rhythm, is something of a free verse classic it is also one of those poems which seem to say much more than the sum of their words. From the fact that the poem is a note we may surmise that the marriage involves frequent periods of absence. Reading it as a poem, we can further imagine that the poet is staying up late working on his poetry rather than being tucked up in bed with his wife. To this extent he’s apologising for rather more than just eating the plums. There is also the implication that if he needs to work late at night he’s probably got a demanding day job (with which, in those days, he is probably supporting her). The poet is also saying that small sensuous delights, such as eating cold plums, are important to both husband and wife (otherwise he wouldn’t need to apologise) — and that this shared sensuousness extends to other aspects of their life as well.
For those readers still unconvinced, it is useful to consider the beginning of a comparable note that Williams’ wife, Floss, wrote to her him, with no intention of its being a poem. ‘Dear Bill: I’ve made a / couple of sandwiches for you. / In the ice-box you’ll find / blue-berries — a cup of grapefruit / and a glass of cold coffee.’
If you have to be told which one’s the poem it may be that you’re already a writer of bad free verse or someone who has yet to read past the nineteenth century. A sad fate, in either case.
This essay by Geoff Page is from his book 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now (University of New South Wales Press, 2006) and is reproduced on andrewlansdown.com by kind permission of the author.