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Selected Poems
from
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by
Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair
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Tract
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral
for you have it over a troop
of artists---
unless one should scour the world---
5
you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black---
nor white either---and not polished!
10
Let it be weathered---like a farm wagon---
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the
ground.
15
Knock the glass out!
My God---glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out if for us to see
how well he is housed or to
see
20
the flowers or the lack of them---
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what
not.
25
Let there be no glass---
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom---
my townspeople what are you thinking
of?
30
A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.
No wreaths
please---
35
Especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes---a few books perhaps---
God knows what! You
realize
40
how we are about these things
my townspeople---
something will be found---anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the
hearse.
45
For heaven's sake though see to the
driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him---
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own
dignity!
50
Bring him down---bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all---damn him---
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the
reins
55
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!
Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind---as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you
ride
60
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly---
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What---from us? We who have
perhaps
65
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us---it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are
ready.
70
1917
__________
The Widow's Lament
in Springtime1
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold
fire
5
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of
flowers.
10
Masses of flowers
loaded the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my
heart
15
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turned away forgetting.
Today my son told
me
20
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
25
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
1921
1. The
poem is a tribute to William's mother.
__________
The Great
Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a
red
5
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong
clangs
10
siren howls
and wheels 'rumbling
through the dark city.
1921
__________
Spring and All
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
5
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
10
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines---
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring
approaches---
15
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
20
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
25
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
1923
__________
The Red
Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with
rain
5
water
beside the white
chickens.
1923
__________
At the Ball
Game
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them---
all the exciting
detail
5
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius---
all to no end save beauty
the
eternal---
10
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and
defied---
15
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut---
The flashy female with her
mother, gets
it---
20
The Jew gets it straight---it
is deadly, terrifying---
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty
itself
25
that lives
day by day in them
idly---
This is
the power of their
faces
30
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently,
seriously
35
without thought
1923
__________
Portrait of a
Lady
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper.2 Your
knees
5
are a southern breeze---or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
---as if that answered
anything. Ah,
yes---below
10
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the
shore---
15
Which shore?---
the sand clings to my lips---
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe, How
should I
know?
20
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
1934
2. Jean
Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a French painter, was famous for his
pictures of outdoor gatherings of people. However, Williams evidently
has in mind "The Swing," a famous painting by another
French artist, Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806, line 8), in which
the girl on the swing has kicked off her slipper, which hangs
perpetually in mid-air.
__________
The Yachts
contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses
tortures the biggest hulls, the best man
knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them
pitilessly.
5
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute
brilliance of cloudless days, with broad
bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls
ant-like, solicitously grooming them,
releasing,
10
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.
In a well guarded arena of open water
surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful,
rare
15
as the light of a happy eye, live with the
grace
of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them
is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if
feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails
completely.
20
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts
move, jockeying for a start, the signal is
set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.3
Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at
the
prows.
25
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is sea of faces about them in agony, in despair
until the horror of the race dawns
staggering the mind,
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold.
Broken,
30
beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to
be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.
1935
3. That
is, reduce the area of their sails, thus go slower.
__________
These
are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.
The year plunges into night
and the heart
plunges
5
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---
10
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
15
would be embraced---emptiness,
despair---(They
whine and whistle) among
the flashes and booms of war;
house of whose
rooms
20
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
25
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 counterfoil4 to
sweetest
30
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
35
splashing---that is now stone.
1938
4. For
example, a check stub.
__________
The Dance
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,5
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-
5
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
shank must be sound to bear up under
such
10
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
1944
5. Pieter
Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), the Flemish painter, was most
famous for his pictures of peasant life, set in ordinary Dutch farms
and villages. A kermess is an outdoor festival or fair held to benefit
a church on the town's patron saint's day.
__________
Burning the
Christmas Greens
Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
---go up in a roar
All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the
green
5
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash---
and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed
become
10
a landscape of flame
At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their
green
15
At the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold's
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees
to fill our needs, and
over
20
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons
we stuck the green prongs
in the windows
hung
25
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the
mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of
small
30
white deer as if they
were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare.
We
35
stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under them
and we stood there looking
down.
40
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we
did not say so) a challenge
above the
snow's
45
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where
small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for
them
50
and knocks down
the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow---Transformed!
55
Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant!6 roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.
In the jagged flames
green
60
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind
and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world!
Black
65
mountains, black and red---as
yet uncolored---and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant,
lost,
70
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
1944
6. One
who has renounced formerly held principles or faith.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern
Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 107-117.
-----
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