Nathalie's William Carlos Williams Page

Home
Biographical Information
Bibliography
Selected Earlier Poems
Selected Later Poems
My Comments
Williams' Contemporaries
Sources
Guest Book

 
 
Some Examples of Williams' Earlier Poetry
 
Willam Carlos Williams' earlier poetry consists of the poems he wrote up until 1949.

Full Moon
(from Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale)
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
Blessed moon
noon
of night
 
that through the dark
bids Love
stay--
 
curious shapes
awake
to plague me
 
Is day near
shining girl?
Yes, day!
 
the warm
the radiant
all fulfilling
 
day.
 
 
 
The House
(from Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale)
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
The house is yours
to wander in as you please--
Your breakfast will be kept
ready for you until
 
you choose to arise!
This is the front room
where we stood penniless
by the hogstead of crockery.
 
This is the kitchen--
We have a new
hotwater heater and a new
gas-stove to please you
 
And the front stairs
have been freshly painted--
white risers
and the treads mahogany.
 
Come upstairs
to the bedroom--
Your bed awaits you--
the chiffonier waits--
 
The whole house
is waiting--for you
to walk in it at you pleasure--
It is yours.
 
 
 
Spring Storm
(from Sour Grapes)
(1921)
 
The sky has given over
its bitterness.
Out of the dark change
all day long
rain falls and falls
as if it would never end.
Still the snow keeps
its hold on the ground.
But water, water
from a thousand runnels!
It collects swiftly,
dappled with black
cuts a way for itself
through the green ice in the gutters
Drop after drop it falls
from the withered grass-stems
of the overhanging embankment.
 
 
 
The Birds
(from Sour Grapes)
(1921)
 
The world begins again!
Not wholly insufflated
the blackbirds in the rain
upon the dead topbranches
of the living tree,
stuck fast to the low clouds,
notate the dawn.
Their shrill cries sound
announcing appetite
and drop among the bending roses
and the dripping grass.
 
 
 
The Nightingales
(from Sour Grapes)
(1921)
 
My shoes as I lean
unlacing them
stand out upon
flat worsened flowers.
 
Nimbly the shadows
of my fingers play
unlacing
over shoes and flowers.
 
 
 
The Rose
(from Spring and All)
(1923)
 
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--
 
whither?  It ends--
 
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a gepometry--
 
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
 
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--
 
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
 
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
 
What
 
The place between the petal's
edge and the
 
From the petal's edge a line starts
 that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--
 
The fragility of the flower
unbruiced
penetrates space
 
 
 
Unnamed
(from Paterson)
(1948)
 
            1
Your lovely hands
Your lovely tender hands!
Reflections of what grace
what heavenly joy
 
predicted for the world
in knowing you--
blest, as am I, and humbled
by such ecstacy.
 
 
            2
When I saw
the flowers
 
I was
thunderstuck!
 
You should not
have been--
 
Tulips, she said
and smiled.
 
 
            3
I bought a new
bathing suit
 
Just pants
and a brassiere
 
I haven't shown
it
 
to my mother
yet.
 
 
            4
Better than flowers
is a view of yourself
my darling--
 
I'm so glad you came
I thought I should never
see you again.
 
 
 
Pastoral
(from Al Que Quiere!
To Him Who Wants it)
(1917)
 
The little sparrows
hop ingeniuously
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.
 
 
 
Spring and All
(from Spring and All)
(1923)
 
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.
 
 
 
Paterson: the Falls
(from The Wedge)
(1944)
 
What common language to unravel?
The Falls, combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock's
lip.  Strike in!  the middle of
 
some trenchant phrase, some
well packed clause.  Then  .  .  .
This is my plan.  4 sections:  First,
the archaic persons of the drama.
 
An eternity of bird and bush,
resolved.  An unraveling:
the confused streams aligned, side
by side, speaking!  Sound
 
married to strength, a strength
of falling--from a heigth!  The wild
voice of the shirt-sleeved
Evangelist rivaling, Hear
 
me!  I am the Resurrection
and the Life!  echoing
among the bass and pickerel, slim
eels from Barbados, Sargasso
 
Sea, working up the coast to that
bounty, ponds and wild streams--
Third, the old town:  Alexander Hamilton
working up from St. Croix,
 
from that sea! and deeper, whence
he came!  stopped cold
by that unmoving roar, fastened
there: the rocks silent
 
but the water, married to the stone,
voluble, though frozen; the water
even when and though frozen
still whispers and moans--
 
And in the brittle air
a factory bell clangs, at dawn, and
snow whines under their feet.  Fourth,
the modern town, a
 
disembodied roar!  the cataract and
its clamor broken apart--and from
all learning, the empty
ear struck from within, roaring...
 
         

Poem
(from Collected Poems,
1921--1931)
(1934)
 
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
 
 
 
Breakfast
(from Recent Verse)
(1938)
 
Twenty sparrows
on
 
a scattered
turd:
 
Share and share
alike
 
 
Pastoral
(from Al Que Quiere!
To Him Who Wants it)
(1917)
 
When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself,
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.
 
              No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
 
 
 
Moon and Stars
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
January!  The beginning!
A moon
scoured by the wind
calls
 
from its cavern.  A vacant
eye
stares.  The wind
howls.
 
Among bones in rose flesh
singing
wake the stormy
stars.
 
 
 
Young Woman at a Window
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
She sits with
tears on
 
her cheek
her cheek on
 
her hand
the child
 
in her lap
his nose
 
pressed
to the glass
 
 
 
The Red Wheelbarrow
(from Spring and All)
(1923)
 
so much depends
upon
 
a red wheel
barrow
 
glazed with rain
water
 
beside the white
chickens.
 
 
 
Between Walls
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
the back wings
of the
 
hospital where
nothing
 
will grow lie
cinders
 
in which shine
the broken
 
pieces of a green
bottle
 
 
 
To Have Done Nothing
(from Spring and All)
(1923)
 
No that is not it
nothing that I have done
nothing
I have done
 
is made up of
nothing
and the diphtong
 
ae
 
together with
the first person
aingular
indicative
 
of the auxiliary
verb
to have
 
everything
I have done
is the same
 
if to do
is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations
 
involving the
moral
physical
and religious
 
codes
 
for everything
and nothing
are synonymous
when
 
energy in vacuo
has the power
of confusion
 
which only to
have done nothing
can make
perfect
 
 
 
Graph for Action
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
Don't say "humbly".
"Respectfully", yes
but not "humbly".
 
And the Committee
both farted
and that settled it.
 
 
 
To Greet a Letter-Carrier
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
Why don't you bring me
a good letter?  One with
lots of money in it.
I could make use of that.
Atta boy!  Atta boy!
 
 
 
A Sort of a Song
(from The Wedge)
(1944)
 
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 Predicter of Famine
(from The Broken Span)
(1941)
 
White day, black river
corrugated and swift--
 
as the stone of the sky
on the prongy ring
of the tarnished city
in smooth and without motion:
 
A gull flies low
upstream, his beak tilted
sharply, his eye
alert to the providing water.
 
 
 
 
Descent
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
From disorder (a chaos)
order grows
--grows fruitful.
The chaos feeds it.  Chaos
feeds the tree.
 
 
 
The Lonely Street
(from Sour Grapes)
(1921)
 
School is over.  It is too hot
to walk at ease.  At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall.  They hold pink
flames in their right hands.
In white from head to foot,
with sidelong, idle look--
in yellow, floating stuff,
black sash and stockings--
touching their avid mouths
with pink sugar on a stick--
like a carnation each holds in her hand--
they mount the lonely street.
 
 
 
 
You Have Pissed Your Life
(from The Collected Earlier Poems)
(1934)
 
      Any way you walk
      Any way you turn
      Any way you stand
      Any way you lie
You have pissed your life
 
From an infectual fool
butting his head blindly
against obstacles,become
brilliant--focusing,
performing accurately to
a given end--
 
      Any way you walk
      Any way you turn
      Any way you stand
      Any way you lie
You have pissed your life