Happy Birthday, William
William Carlos Williams, great American poet, born today in 1883. Like a superhero with a secret identity, he was a doctor by day and poet by night, writing lines of deceptive simplicity.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
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.
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
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
(More poems here and poems and short bio here)
2 Comments:
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At 12:21 PM, September 17, 2009
Anonymous had this to say...
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At 12:48 PM, September 17, 2009
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->The red wheelbarrow poem was used in a creative writing course I once took at university, to illustrate some sort of literary point. I was unclear on exactly what that point was, but as well as I can reproduce it, the idea was that the poem as a whole provokes a vivid mental image, but that image fades into a hazy abstraction if any component of the poem is taken away. This, the tutor seemed to imply, was supposed to illustrate something profound.
I would be interested to hear how you would express the merits of the poem as you see them.
The poem is imagist - it's about anything, it's about the image. And the image is a whole. A key word is glazed: this isn't pure description, it imposes an aesthetic evaluation. The staggering meter (always 2 stressed/1 stressed, but surrounded by differing numbers of unstressed, and with the main stress also shifting) makes the fluid and striving - seeking for a pattern it never quite reaches. The poem strives to fix its readers squarely in one single moment, making them aware of everything by focusing so deeply on one thing - one thing composed of three things (red barrow, rain, white chickens: that's all there is). "So much depends" on this - the readers have to decide what that is. Life? Thought? Existence? For me, what Williams is doing here is almost zen.
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