William Carlos Williams was a working doctor (Baym 832), which would leave one to believe that he thinks more analytically than many other artists, but of course that meshed well with the Modern period he was writing in, which sought: “order, sequence, and unity in works of art” (712). As a doctor, “the sickness and suffering he saw…entered into his poetry” (833); undoubtedly he would have seen a lot of death in his line of work and because average life expectancy was shorter at the beginning of his career than at the end of his life. However, he also saw a lot of life and new beginnings: as a pediatrician “he delivered more than two thousand babies” (832). Though his poems are not autobiographical (833), no one can write poetry without bringing something of their life to the work: some of Williams’ poems tend to be dark, while others look at the world with almost an innocent point of view.
“The Young Housewife” focuses on a young woman whose life has a dubious conclusion. The poem does not rhyme, is composed of twelve lines in three stanzas of varying lengths, and is incredibly short. More questions are asked than answered here. The poem contains elements of “the mixed belittlement-adoration accorded [women] by men” (832): the narrator seems to be in awe of her “shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray ends of hair” (Williams 833) and simultaneously have a macabre view of her. The driver “compare[s] her to a fallen leaf” (833) and then runs over leaves. Upon my first reading I was left feeling slightly shocked: did he run over her? Was the bow of his head a sign of respect or was he feeling murderous as he “pass[ed] smiling” (834)? I read this poem to my mother and a sister and they had the same interpretation. There isn’t an answer to these questions within the poem itself: they are open ended. In one moment the narrator appears to be respectful, and in the next he is thoughtlessly running over the leaves (or her). Even if he isn’t committing vehicular manslaughter he has just compared her to something that he doesn’t hesitate to crush, perhaps Williams only meant this as a juxtaposition of his musings. It seems fairly clear, however, that any driver in 1916 most likely would have disapproved of a young woman running around in her nightgown to see men at the front door, especially at ten in the morning, but the line “then again she comes to the curb” (833) makes it seem that she does this often and that he likes to drive by for the show, which makes him sound even more menacing because he didn’t just thoughtlessly run over her, he’s been stalking her.
“Spring and All” runs like one long run on sentence and is the longest assigned poem of Williams’. Once again, there is no rhyme scheme, as seems to be common for this poet. The beginning starts off very dreary; it is obvious that winter is holding on, and everything has a whisper of death upon it, from the “contagious hospital” to the “small trees / with dead, brown leaves under them / leafless vines” (836). The transition comes in the middle of the poem, in lines 14-15 when “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches” (836). Suddenly the dreariness and despair is broken with new hope. Lines 16-18 bring to mind the fact that he is a doctor that delivered babies when he wrote: “They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter” (836). Upon first reading this poem was confusing and seemed dark, owing to the bleakly descriptive words Williams used, but the stanzas break it up for the reader so as not to overwhelm, and the poem ends on a very positive note with terminology that reinforces the temporal nature of winter in the life cycle of a plant: “the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken” (836).
“The Red Wheelbarrow” is very short: only eight lines. It has no punctuation or capitalization, which immediately puts me in mind of e.e. cummings. The subject of this poem is very every day, not depressing at all, and could seem dull, but his word play holds the reader’s interest. Each stanza is composed of two lines, the first line being three words long, with a thought completed by the one word on the second line. The entire poem could be considered to be one sentence, short and simple, but the arrangement of the words causes the reader to pause and consider. “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow” just does not read the same way, the line breaks are part of the poem’s meaning.
“This Is Just to Say” reads like a note that a husband would leave for his wife. I had to laugh, and read it to my mother: she said she would be annoyed with my father if he left her a note like that. Once again, Williams uses carefully placed line breaks, and no punctuation, though the first letter of stanzas one and three are capitalized because they begin the poem’s two apparent sentences. Interestingly, the narrator writes “forgive me” but does not seem to be very repentant (839); his concluding observation, “they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold,” rather seems to be rubbing in the fact that he enjoyed the fruit alone (839).
To Williams, “rhythm within the line, and linking one line to another, was the heart of the poetic craft” (Baym 833); that concept is clear in all four of these poems. One of these poems reflects on nature, but he did not use the same methods that the Naturalists did, he wrote with a different voice entirely that is thoughtful and sometimes confusing. He saw the world in a different way than his predecessors, and so he wrote about it in a different way as well. He was living in a time in which questions didn’t always have answers, and this comes through in his writing. It is my opinion that, whether he was writing about the simple or the abstract, he was very successful at finding the rhythm at the heart and linking it to the reader.
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