The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems Read online

  THE RED WHEELBARROW

  And other poems

  ALSO BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Asphodel

  The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

  The Build-up

  By Word of Mouth

  The Collected Poems, Volume I: 1909–1939

  The Collected Poems, Volume II: 1939–1962

  The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams

  The Doctor Stories

  The Embodiment of Knowledge

  Interviews with William Carlos Williams

  In the American Grain

  In the Money

  I Wanted to Write a Poem

  Many Loves and Other Plays

  Paterson

  Pictures from Brueghel

  A Recognizable Image

  Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams

  The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams

  Selected Poems

  Something to Say

  Spring and All

  A Voyage to Pagany

  White Mule

  The William Carlos Williams Reader

  Yes, Mrs. Williams

  Contents

  This Is Just to Say

  The Red Wheelbarrow

  Spring and All

  The Dance

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

  The Great Figure

  Complaint

  To a Poor Old Woman

  Danse Russe

  Poem

  Nantucket

  The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

  A Sort of a Song

  The Young Housewife

  These

  To Elsie

  The Yachts

  To Waken an Old Lady

  Portrait of a Lady

  Between Walls

  Burning the Christmas Greens

  Queen-Anne’s-Lace

  The Poem

  Pastoral

  The Last Words of My English Grandmother

  The Term

  The Dance

  The Pot of Flowers

  The Descent

  Young Sycamore

  The Poor

  The Rose

  Proletarian Portrait

  Tract

  The Ivy Crown

  The Locust Tree in Flower

  Landmarks

  Cover

  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

  The Red Wheelbarrow

  so much depends

  upon

  a red wheel

  barrow

  glazed with rain

  water

  beside the white

  chickens.

  Spring and All

  I

  By the road to the contagious hospital

  under the surge of the blue

  mottled clouds driven from the

  northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the

  waste of broad, muddy fields

  brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

  patches of standing water

  the scattering of tall trees

  All along the road the reddish

  purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

  stuff of bushes and small trees

  with dead, brown leaves under them

  leafless vines —

  Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

  dazed spring approaches —

  They enter the new world naked,

  cold, uncertain of all

  save that they enter. All about them

  the cold, familiar wind —

  Now the grass, tomorrow

  the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

  One by one objects are defined —

  It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

  But now the stark dignity of

  entrance — Still, the profound change

  has come upon them: rooted, they

  grip down and begin to awaken

  X

  The universality of things

  draws me toward the candy

  with melon flowers that open

  about the edge of refuse

  proclaiming without accent

  the quality of the farmer’s

  shoulders and his daughter’s

  accidental skin, so sweet

  with clover and the small

  yellow cinquefoil in the

  parched places. It is

  this that engages the favorable

  distortion of eyeglasses

  that see everything and remain

  related to mathematics —

  in the most practical frame of

  brown celluloid made to

  represent tortoiseshell —

  A letter from the man who

  wants to start a new magazine

  made of linen

  and he owns a typewriter —

  July 1,1922

  All this is for eyeglasses

  to discover. But

  they lie there with the gold

  earpieces folded down

  tranquilly Titicaca —

  XIV

  Of death

  the barber

  the barber

  talked to me

  cutting my

  life with

  sleep to trim

  my hair —

  It’s just

  a moment

  he said, we die

  every night —

  And of

  the newest

  ways to grow

  hair on

  bald death —

  I told him

  of the quartz

  lamp

  and of old men

  with third

  sets of teeth

  to the cue

  of an old man

  who said

  at the door —

  Sunshine today!

  for which

  death shaves

  him twice

  a week

  XX

  The sea that encloses her young body

  ula lu la lu

  is the sea of many arms —

  The blazing secrecy of noon is undone

  and and and

  the broken sand is the sound of love —

  The flesh is firm that turns in the sea

  O la la O

  the sea that is cold with dead men’s tears —

  Deeply the wooing that penetrated

  to the edge of the sea

  returns in the plash of the waves —

  a wink over the shoulder

  large as the ocean —

  with wave following wave to the edge

  Oom barroom

  It is the cold of the sea

  broken upon the sand by the force

  of the moon —

  In the sea the young flesh playingr />
  floats with the cries of far off men

  who rise in the sea

  with green arms

  to homage again the fields over there

  where the night is deep —

  la lu la lu

  but lips too few

  assume the new — marruu

  Underneath the sea where it is dark

  there is no edge

  so two —

  The Dance

  In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,

  the dancers go round, they go round and

  around, the squeal and the blare and the

  tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

  tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

  sided glasses whose wash they impound)

  their hips and their bellies off balance

  to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

  the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

  shanks must be sound to bear up under such

  rollicking measures, prance as they dance

  in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

  According to Brueghel

  when Icarus fell

  it was spring

  a farmer was ploughing

  his field

  the whole pageantry

  of the year was

  awake tingling

  near

  the edge of the sea

  concerned

  with itself

  sweating in the sun

  that melted

  the wings’ wax

  unsignificantly

  off the coast

  there was

  a splash quite unnoticed

  this was

  Icarus drowning

  The Great Figure

  Among the rain

  and lights

  I saw the figure 5

  in gold

  on a red

  firetruck

  moving

  tense

  unheeded

  to gong clangs

  siren howls

  and wheels rumbling

  through the dark city.

  Complaint

  They call me and I go.

  It is a frozen road

  past midnight, a dust

  of snow caught

  in the rigid wheeltracks.

  The door opens.

  I smile, enter and

  shake off the cold.

  Here is a great woman

  on her side in the bed.

  She is sick,

  perhaps vomiting,

  perhaps laboring

  to give birth to

  a tenth child. Joy! Joy!

  Night is a room

  darkened for lovers,

  through the jalousies the sun

  has sent one gold needle!

  I pick the hair from her eyes

  and watch her misery

  with compassion.

  To a Poor Old Woman

  munching a plum on

  the street a paper bag

  of them in her hand

  They taste good to her

  They taste good

  to her. They taste

  good to her

  You can see it by

  the way she gives herself

  to the one half

  sucked out in her hand

  Comforted

  a solace of ripe plums

  seeming to fill the air

  They taste good to her

  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?

  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

  Nantucket

  Flowers through the window

  lavender and yellow

  changed by white curtains —

  Smell of cleanliness —

  Sunshine of late afternoon —

  On the glass tray

  a glass pitcher, the tumbler

  turned down, by which

  a key is lying — And the

  immaculate white bed

  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.

  A Sort of a Song

  Let the snake wait under

  his weed

  and the writing

  be of words, slow and quick, sharp

  to strike, quiet to wait,

  sleepless.

  — through metaphor to reconcile

  the people and the stones.

  Compose. (No ideas

  but in things) Invent!

  Saxifrage is my flower that splits

  the rocks.

  The Young Housewife

  At ten A.M. the young housewife

  moves about in negligee behind

  the wooden walls of her husband’s house.

  I pass solitary in my car.

  Then again she comes to the curb

  to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands

  shy, uncorseted, tucking in

  stray ends of hair, and I compare her

  to a fallen leaf.

  The noiseless wheels of my car

  rush with a crackling sound over

  dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

  These

  are the desolate, dark weeks

  when nature in its barrenness

  equals the stupidity of man.

  The year plunges into night

  and the hear
t plunges

  lower than night

  to an empty, windswept place

  without sun, stars or moon

  but a peculiar light as of thought

  that spins a dark fire —

  whirling upon itself until,

  in the cold, it kindles

  to make a man aware of nothing

  that he knows, not loneliness

  itself — Not a ghost but

  would be embraced — emptiness,

  despair — (They

  whine and whistle) among

  the flashes and booms of war;

  houses of whose rooms

  the cold is greater than can be thought,

  the people gone that we loved,

  the beds lying empty, the couches

  damp, the chairs unused —

  Hide it away somewhere

  out of the mind, let it get roots

  and grow, unrelated to jealous

  ears and eyes — for itself.

  In this mine they come to dig — all.

  Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

  music? The source of poetry that

  seeing the clock stopped, says,

  The clock has stopped

  that ticked yesterday so well?

  and hears the sound of lakewater

  splashing — that is now stone.

  To Elsie

  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