Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams
Table of Contents
header
Blizzard
Complete Destruction
The crowd at the ball game
Danse Russe
Dedication for a Plot of Ground
The Desolate Field
Muier
Pastoral
Queen-Anne's Lace
so much depends
Sympathetic Portrait of a Child
To Elsie
Tract
To Waken an Old Lady
Transitional
Winter Trees
Blizzard
Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down --
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes --
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there --
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.
Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921)
Complete Destruction
It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set fire to it
in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.
Sour Grapes: a Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921): 53
The crowd at the ball game
XXVI
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them --
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius --
all to no end save beauty
0the eternal --
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied --
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut --
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it --
The Jew gets it straight -- it
is deadly, terrifying --
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly --
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
Spring and All ([Paris]: Contact, 1923): 93-95
Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, --
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
if I admire my arms, my face
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, --
who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 44-45
Dedication for a Plot of Ground
This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
who was born in England; married;
lost her husband and with
her five year old son
sailed for New York in a two-master;
was driven to the Azores;
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal,
met her second husband
in a Brooklyn boarding house,
went with him to Puerto Rico
bore three more children, lost
her second husband, lived hard
for eight years in St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed
the oldest son to New York,
lost her daughter, lost her "baby,"
seized the two boys of
the oldest son by the second marriage
mothered them -- they being
motherless -- fought for them
against the other grandmother
and the aunts, brought them here
summer after summer, defended
herself here against thieves,
storms, sun, fire,
against flies, against girls
that came smelling about, against
drought, against weeds, storm-tides,
neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens,
against the weakness of her own hands,
against the growing strength of
the boys, against wind, against
the stones, against trespassers,
against rents, against her own mind.
She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and --
If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 69-71.
The Desolate Field
Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and --
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . . ?
-- and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.
from The Dial 69 (1920)
Muier
Oh, black Persian cat!
Was not your life
already cursed with offspring?
We took you for rest to that old
Yankee farm, -- so lonely
and with so many field mice
in the long grass --
and you return to us
in this condition --!
Oh, black Persian cat.
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 33-34.
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.
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 23-24
Queen-Anne's Lace
Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth -- nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over --
or nothing.
Sour Grapes: a Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921): 58.
so much depends
XXII
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Spring and All ([Paris]: Contact, 1923): 78
Sympathetic Portrait of a Child
The murderer's little daughter
who is barely ten years old
jerks her shoulders
right and left
so as to catch a glimpse of me
without turning round.
Her skinny little arms
wrap themselves
this way then that
reversely about her body!
Nervously
she crushes her straw hat
about her eyes
and tilts her head
to deepen the shadow --
smiling excitedly!
As best as she can
she hides herself
in the full sunlight
her cordy legs writhing
beneath the little flowered dress
that leaves them bare
from mid-thigh to ankle --
Why has she chosen me
for the knife
that darts along her smile?
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 54-55.
To Elsie
XVIII
The pure products of America
go crazy --
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure --
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags -- succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum --
which they cannot express --
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent --
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard pressed
house in the suburbs --
some doctor's family, some Elsie --
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us --
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
Spring and All ([Paris]: Contact, 1923): 67-70
Tract
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral --
for you have it over a troop
of artists--
unless one should scour the world --
you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black --
nor white either -- and not polished!
Let it be weathered -- like a farm wagon --
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.
Knock the glass out!
My God-glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
how well he is housed or to see
the flowers or the lack of them --
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass --
and no upholstery phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom --
my townspeople what are you thinking of?
A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.
No wreathes please --
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes -- a few books perhaps --
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople --
something will be found -- anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.
For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him --
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down -- bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all -- damn him --
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!
Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind -- as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly --
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What -- from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us -- it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are ready.
A Book of Poems. Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917): 26-28
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
see husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty
from The Dial 1920
Transitional
First he said:
It is the woman in us
That makes us write--
Let us acknowledge it--
Men would be silent.
We are not men
Therefore we can speak
And be conscious
(of the two sides)
Unbent by the sensual
As befits accuracy.
I then said:
Dare you make this
Your propaganda?
And he answered:
Am I not I--here?
(from The Tempers, 1913)
Winter Trees
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
Sour Grapes: a Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921): 36.
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