Selected Poems Read online

  Williams may not have been capable of the unity of The Waste Land, but, as Octavio Paz insists, introducing his translations of Williams in Veinte Poemas, “The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and the perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of modern American poetry.” And the vivacity arises, one might add, from the unexpectedness of Williams’s apparently wayward forms. How, for example, in “Raindrops on a Briar” (p. 172), did one get from the opening statement to those waterdrops “ranged upon the arching stems / irregularly as an accompaniment,” and yet wasn’t that devious track the poem’s most exact way of saying what it had to and by a superb use of form?

  Williams’s attitude to form rather resembles his attitude to friendship, which should be, he says, “dangerous—uncertain—made of many questionable crossties, I think, that might fail it. But while they last, give it a good cellular structure—paths, private connections between the members—full of versatility.” This passage comes from Williams’s Autobiography—Chapter 49, “Friendship.” In Chapter 50, “Projective Verse,” it is silently transfigured into an ideal of artistic form, and this ideal is seen as part and parcel of Williams’s conception of locality. Chapter 50 is, in many ways, pivotal to the book, for, in using Charles Olson’s conception of “composition by field,” Williams does so—and very tactfully—against an implied background of why his forms were not readily understood in his own country or ours, why “The Criterion had no place for me,” why Eliot’s The Waste Land had seemed to him “the great catastrophe to our letters … Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of reviving my world.” That world seemed to Williams to receive its recognition in Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, with its preference for an explorative, syllable-based verse and its invitation “to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language … to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” In Chapter 50 Williams juxtaposes “this place of elements” with an actual place—and the leap is beautifully justified in the chapter as a whole—with the painter Charles Sheeler taking over a small stone house on a ravaged New York estate and making of it “a cell, a seed of intelligence and feeling security.” “The poem,” says Williams, “is our objective, the secret at the heart of the matter—as Sheeler’s small house, re-organized, is the heart of the gone estate of the Lowes …” Sheeler and his Russian wife and what they do with the local conditions are vibrant with meaning for Williams as a poet, and the form of the chapter lays bare that meaning: “It is ourselves we organize in this way not against the past or for the future or even for survival but for integrity of understanding to insure persistence, to give the mind its stay.” Coming, as it does, in the last lap of the book, this makes a fine conscious formulation for the many years of groping with the potentials of language and it balances foursquare in the American locality a mind that had gone back to it armed—despite Williams’s frequent protests—by Europe. The figures who stand out in those autobiographical pages are Joyce and Brancusi as well as Sheeler and Demuth: Paris counterpoints Rutherford and New York.

  Of all the American modernists Williams was the most tardy in receiving recognition. His writing lifetime was dominated by the literary criteria of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, in neither of whose terminology was there a place for the kind of thing Williams was concerned with doing. Parker Tyler imagines Williams explaining why T. S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative was not for him and where its shortcomings lay: “My theory of poetry was that it arises from immediate environment, and in the case of my environment, America, the poetic formulas for familiar (or ‘objective correlative’) emotions did not exist. Why not? Because the emotions themselves, and the very imagery of their implicit situations, were elusive and unformed.”

  To name what possessed no name, to avoid surrendering oneself “into the inverted cone of waning energy … [and] fly off at last into nonentity, general deracinate conclusions,” were the tasks that Williams had recognized early on—earlier, in fact, than the 1913 essay, “Speech Rhythm,” quoted above. How early one realizes in his accounts of his undergraduate poem (which he burned) about the prince who is abducted and taken to an unknown country—Williams’s inarticulate America—to wake confronted by all the problems of language and cultural identity that Williams himself was to face: “No one was there to inform him of his whereabouts and when he did begin to encounter passers-by, they didn’t even understand, let alone speak his language. He could recall nothing of the past … So he went on, homeward or seeking a home that was his own, all this through a ‘foreign’ country whose language was barbarous.”

  This myth would seem to lend itself to a long psychic alienation. But one sees Williams breaking through by meeting the demands of day-to-day existence, never too involved in himself to feel the ballast of place, people and things. The source of his resilience recalls his hero, the Jesuit Père Rasles, among the Indians, of In the American Grain: “This is a moral source not reckoned with, peculiarly sensitive and daring in its close embrace of native things … For everything his fine sense, blossoming, thriving, opening, reviving—not shutting out—was tuned. He speaks of his struggles with their language, its peculiar beauties, ‘je ne sais quoi d’énergique,’ he cited its tempo, the form of its genius with gusto, with admiration, with generosity.”

  The myth of the prince and the necessity of a counter-statement to it underlie Williams’s work. In his Autobiography, the counter-statement reappears in the final pages when he drives out to look at the site of the poem, Paterson: “The Falls let out a roar as it crashed upon the rocks at its base. In the imagination this roar is a speech or a voice, a speech in particular; it is the poem itself that is the answer.”

  A Note on This Selection

  Although only the second version of “The Locust Tree in Flower” (p. 94) appeared in An Early Martyr, I have, however, printed the first version beside it. “There are no perfect waves” (p. 82), “that brilliant field” (p. 83), and “in this strong light” (p. 84) did not appear in The Collected Poems 1921-31 (1934) but in Ezra Pound’s The Exile (Autumn 1928) and were not republished until 1938. However, since 1934 is closer than 1938 to the date of first publication I have attempted to uphold the principle of chronological order and also to locate them in the same sequence as Williams ultimately did. I have reprinted extracts from Williams’s long poem, Paterson, all together (the dates of publication of the various books of this are given) rather than chop it up between the volumes of shorter poems which punctuated its appearance. The poem, “Tribute to Painters,” first appears in Journey to Love (1955): Williams reprinted a rather insensitively cut version of this in Paterson, Book 5 (1958). I have chosen the earlier form of it.

  For their helpful suggestions in updating this new, American edition, special thanks are due A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.

  The Wanderer

  (1913)

  The Wanderer

  A ROCOCO STUDY

  ADVENT

  Even in the time when as yet

  I had no certain knowledge of her

  She sprang from the nest, a young crow,

  Whose first flight circled the forest.

  I know now how then she showed me

  Her mind, reaching out to the horizon,

  She close above the tree tops.

  I saw her eyes straining at the new distance

  And as the woods fell from her flying

  Likewise they fell from me as I followed

  So that I strongly guessed all that I must put from me

  To come through ready for the high courses.

  But one day, crossing the ferry

  With the great towers of Manhattan before me,

  Out at the prow with the sea wind blowing,

  I had been wearying many questions

  Which she had put on to try me:

  How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?

 
When lo! in a rush, dragging

  A blunt boat on the yielding river—

  Suddenly I saw her! And she waved me

  From the white wet in midst of her playing!

  She cried me, “Haia! Here I am, son!

  See how strong my little finger is!

  Can I not swim well?

  I can fly too!” And with that a great sea-gull

  Went to the left, vanishing with a wild cry—

  But in my mind all the persons of godhead

  Followed after.

  CLARITY

  “Come!” cried my mind and by her might

  That was upon us we flew above the river

  Seeking her, grey gulls among the white—

  In the air speaking as she had willed it;

  “I am given,” cried I, “now I know it!

  I know now all my time is forespent!

  For me one face is all the world!

  For I have seen her at last, this day,

  In whom age in age is united—

  Indifferent, out of sequence, marvelously!

  Saving alone that one sequence

  Which is the beauty of all the world, for surely

  Either there in the rolling smoke spheres below us

  Or here with us in the air intercircling,

  Certainly somewhere here about us

  I know she is revealing these things!”

  And as gulls we flew and with soft cries

  We seemed to speak, flying, “It is she

  The mighty, recreating the whole world,

  This is the first day of wonders!

  She is attiring herself before me—

  Taking shape before me for worship,

  A red leaf that falls upon a stone!

  It is she of whom I told you, old

  Forgiveless, unreconcilable;

  That high wanderer of by-ways

  Walking imperious in beggary!

  At her throat is loose gold, a single chain

  From among many, on her bent fingers

  Are rings from which the stones are fallen,

  Her wrists wear a diminished state, her ankles

  Are bare! Toward the river! Is it she there?”

  And we swerved clamorously downward—

  “I will take my peace in her henceforth!”

  BROADWAY

  It was then she struck—from behind,

  In mid air, as with the edge of a great wing!

  And instantly down the mists of my eyes

  There came crowds walking—men as visions

  With expressionless, animate faces;

  Empty men with shell-thin bodies

  Jostling close above the gutter,

  Hasting—nowhere! And then for the first time

  I really saw her, really scented the sweat

  Of her presence and—fell back sickened!

  Ominous, old, painted—

  With bright lips, and lewd Jew’s eyes

  Her might strapped in by a corset

  To give her age youth, perfect

  In her will to be young she had covered

  The godhead to go beside me.

  Silent, her voice entered at my eyes

  And my astonished thought followed her easily:

  “Well, do their eyes shine, do their clothes fit?

  These live I tell you! Old men with red cheeks,

  Young men in gay suits! See them!

  Dogged, quivering, impassive—

  Well—are these the ones you envied?”

  At which I answered her, “Marvelous old queen,

  Grant me power to catch something of this day’s

  Air and sun into your service!

  That these toilers after peace and after pleasure

  May turn to you, worshippers at all hours!”

  But she sniffed upon the words warily—

  Yet I persisted, watching for an answer:

  “To you, horrible old woman,

  Who know all fires out of the bodies

  Of all men that walk with lust at heart!

  To you, O mighty, crafty prowler

  After the youth of all cities, drunk

  With the sight of thy archness! All the youth

  That come to you, you having the knowledge

  Rather than to those uninitiate—

  To you, marvelous old queen, give me always

  A new marriage—”

  But she laughed loudly—

  “A new grip upon those garments that brushed me

  In days gone by on beach, lawn, and in forest!

  May I be lifted still, up and out of terror,

  Up from before the death living around me—

  Torn up continually and carried

  Whatever way the head of your whim is,

  A burr upon those streaming tatters—“

  But the night had fallen, she stilled me

  And led me away.

  THE STRIKE

  At the first peep of dawn she roused me!

  I rose trembling at the change which the night saw!

  For there, wretchedly brooding in a corner

  From which her old eyes glittered fiercely—

  “Go!” she said, and I hurried shivering

  Out into the deserted streets of Paterson.

  That night she came again, hovering

  In rags within the filmy ceiling—

  “Great Queen, bless me with thy tatters!”

  “You are blest, go on!”

  “Hot for savagery,

  Sucking the air! I went into the city,

  Out again, baffled onto the mountain!

  Back into the city!

  Nowhere

  The subtle! Everywhere the electric!”

  “A short bread-line before a hitherto empty tea shop:

  No questions—all stood patiently,

  Dominated by one idea: something

  That carried them as they are always wanting to be carried,

  ‘But what is it,’ I asked those nearest me,

  ‘This thing heretofore unobtainable

  ‘That they seem so clever to have put on now!’

  “Why since I have failed them can it be anything but their own brood?

  Can it be anything but brutality?

  On that at least they’re united! That at least

  Is their bean soup, their calm bread and a few luxuries!

  “But in me, more sensitive, marvelous old queen

  It sank deep into the blood, that I rose upon

  The tense air enjoying the dusty fight!

  Heavy drink where the low, sloping foreheads

  The flat skulls with the unkempt black or blond hair,

  The ugly legs of the young girls, pistons

  Too powerful for delicacy!

  The women’s wrists, the men’s arms red

  Used to heat and cold, to toss quartered beeves

  And barrels, and milk-cans, and crates of fruit!

  “Faces all knotted up like burls on oaks,

  Grasping, fox-snouted, thick-lipped,

  Sagging breasts and protruding stomachs,

  Rasping voices, filthy habits with the hands.

  Nowhere you! Everywhere the electric!

  “Ugly, venomous, gigantic!

  Tossing me as a great father his helpless

  Infant till it shriek with ecstasy

  And its eyes roll and its tongue hangs out!—

  “I am at peace again, old queen, I listen clearer now.”

  ABROAD

  Never, even in a dream,

  Have I winged so high nor so well

  As with her, she leading me by the hand,

  That first day on the Jersey mountains!

  And never shall I forget

  The trembling interest with which I heard

  Her voice in a low thunder:

  “You are safe here. Look child, look open-mouth!

  The patch of road between the steep bramble banks;

  The tree in the w
ind, the white house there, the sky!

  Speak to men of these, concerning me!

  For never while you permit them to ignore me

  In these shall the full of my freed voice

  Come grappling the ear with intent!

  Never while the air’s clear coolness

  Is seized to be a coat for pettiness;

  Never while richness of greenery

  Stands a shield for prurient minds;

  Never, permitting these things unchallenged

  Shall my voice of leaves and varicolored bark come free through!”

  At which, knowing her solitude,

  I shouted over the country below me:

  “Waken! my people, to the boughs green

  With ripening fruit within you!

  Waken to the myriad cinquefoil

  In the waving grass of your minds!

  Waken to the silent phoebe nest

  Under the eaves of your spirit!”

  But she, stooping nearer the shifting hills

  Spoke again. “Look there! See them!

  There in the oat field with the horses,

  See them there! bowed by their passions

  Crushed down, that had been raised as a roof beam!

  The weight of the sky is upon them

  Under which all roof beams crumble.

  There is none but the single roof beam:

  There is no love bears against the great firefly!”

  At this I looked up at the sun

  Then shouted again with all the might I had.

  But my voice was a seed in the wind.

  Then she, the old one, laughing

  Seized me and whirling about bore back

  To the city, upward, still laughing

  Until the great towers stood above the marshland

  Wheeling beneath: the little creeks, the mallows

  That I picked as a boy, the Hackensack

  So quiet that seemed so broad formerly:

  The crawling trains, the cedar swamp on the one side—

  All so old, so familiar—so new now

  To my marvelling eyes as we passed

  Invisible.

  SOOTHSAY

  Eight days went by, eight days