Two Poems by William Carlos Williams

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 wild carrot 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

Queen-Anne’s Lace

Her body is not so white as

anemony petals nor so smooth—nor

so remote a thing. It is a field

of the wild carrot taking

the field by force; the grass

does not raise above it.

Here is no question of whiteness,

white as can be, with a purple mole

at the center of each flower.

Each flower is a hand’s span

of her whiteness. Wherever

his hand has lain there is

a tiny purple blemish. Each part

is a blossom under his touch

to which the fibres of her being

stem one by one, each to its end,

until the whole field is a

white desire, empty, a single stem,

a cluster, flower by flower,

a pious wish to whiteness gone over—

or nothing.

William Carlos Williams had published numerous books of poetry, among them are The Tempers, Elkin Matthews, 1913; Al Que Quiere!, Four Seas, 1917; Kora in Hell: Improvisations, Four Seas, 1920, reprinted, Kraus Reprint, 1973; Sour Grapes, Four Seas, 1921; Go Go, Monroe Wheeler, 1923; Spring and All, Contact Publishing, 1923, reprinted, Frontier Press, 1970; Collected Poems, 1921-1931, Objectivist Press, 1934; The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938, New Directions, 1938; The Broken Span, New Directions, 1941; Paterson, New Directions, Book I, 1946, Book II, 1948, Book III, 1949, Book IV, 1951, Book V, 1958, Books I-V published in one volume, 1963; Selected Poems, New Directions, 1949, revised edition, 1968; The Pink Church, Golden Goose Press, 1949; The Collected Later Poems, New Directions, 1950, revised edition, 1963; Collected Earlier Poems, New Directions, 1951, revised edition, 1966; The Desert Music and Other Poems, Random House, 1954; The Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams; or, The Past Recaptured, collected by John C. Thirlwall, published in New Directions 16, New Directions, 1957; Pictures From Brueghel and Other Poems, New Directions, 1962; Selected Poems, Penguin, 1976; Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1909-1939, Carcanet, 1988, Volume 2, 1939-1962, edited by MacGowan, 1989; Early Poems, Dover Publications, 1997; William Carlos Williams, Creative Education, 2003.

His poems have been published in such periodicals as Poetry, The Dial, Origin, Blast, Pagany, Little Review, New Masses, Partisan Review, and Glebe. Contributing editor of literary magazines and journals, including Contact I, 1920-23, and Contact II, 1932 (Poetry Foundation).

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 - March 4, 1963)