Poetry: “Daisy” by William Carlos Williams

I just completed my year long poetry read, Imagist Poetry: An Anthology, from which I blogged a couple of poems (the D.H. Lawrence and the Ezra Pound) here this year.  I am going to conclude with a another short one, this one titled “Daisy” by William Carlos Williams.

William Carlos Williams was one of the top American poets of the 20^th century and extremely influential.  One can look at modern poetry as branching in two different directions.  One branch would be the T.S. Eliot/Ezra Pound branch of highly structured poetry with integrated allusions that suggest, despite its radical approach, continuity with tradition.  The other branch simplifies the structure, minimizes the allusions, if not completely eliminates them, and makes the language more immediate and colloquial.  And in many cases this second branch tries to break from associating with tradition altogether.  This branch has its origins in Walt Whitman, but through William Carlos Williams it shapes modern poetry perhaps even more so than the Eliot/Pound branch.  The Beat poets are a straight line development from Williams’ work. 

The most interesting fact of Williams’ life is that he was a medical doctor, a pediatrician in fact.  Poets don’t make any money from their poetry, so they all have to have other work.  The fact that Williams was a doctor which involves a lot of study and application and still produce high level poetry is amazing.  You don’t usually have enough time as a doctor and a family man (husband and father of two) to really concentrate on writing, but apparently Williams accomplished it all.  Whenever I read a Williams poem, I always look for any medical or pediatric allusions. 

Williams seems to write a lot of poems on flowers.  He may have been a gardener as well.  I have a vague memory that it was something he enjoyed, but I have not been able to verify it.  Flowers for Williams tend to be a metaphor for something more profound.  This poem is in that mode.

 

Daisy

by William Carlos Williams

 

The dayseye hugging the earth

in August, ha!  Spring is

gone down in purple,

weeds stand high in the corn,

the rainbeaten furrow

is clotted with sorrel

and crabgrass, the

branch is black under

the heavy mass of the leaves—

The sun is upon a

slender green stem

ribbed lengthwise.

He lies on his back—

it is a woman also—

he regards his former

majesty and

round the yellow center,

split and creviced and done into

minute flowerheads, he sends out

his twenty rays—a little

and the wind is among them

to grow cool there! 

One turns the thing over

in his hand and looks

at it from the rear: brownedged,

green and pointed scales

armor his yellow. 

But turn and turn

the crisp petals remain

brief, translucent, greenfastened,

barely touching at the edges:

blades of limpid seashell.

 

On its most basic level, the poem is about aging and the fading away of a simple daisy in late August.  We know the flower isn’t standing erect, but is “hugging the earth.”   He is a bit tattered but still fresh enough so that his “twenty rays” of flower petals are intact, and so "he" recalls “his former/majesty.”  We have this unusual observation that the flower is not just male, but “a woman also.”  That is not to say a flower is genderless, but hermaphrodite, which is scientifically true since flowers contain elements of both sexes. 

That scientific observation is actually key to understanding the rest of the poem.  In the two concluding stanzas, the poet seems to be holding the daisy and turning it round and round making observations.  The stance between an observing eye and the flower is the core of the poem, a stance of scientific observation.  Notice the reflection between the daisy which is described as an eye with “a yellow center” and the poet’s eye looking back.  The poem was published in 1921, which would make Williams about thirty-eight, and if we assume he wrote it relatively close to publishing it, then we could make the metaphorical jump that the daisy represents the poet himself, feeling passed mid life and heading toward the autumn of his years.

Poetry: The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

I just came across this Ezra Pound poem for the first time, though apparently it’s somewhat well known.  I came across it in my reading of Imagist Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Bob Blaisdell.    Ezra Pound either has some really great poems or some really crappy ones.  This is a great poem. 

 

First, let me say that Pound translated a lot of classical Chinese poetry, but his translations are fine poems in themselves.  A lot of times, poetry loses something in translation.  I can’t vouch for how accurate this translation but it’s a wonderful poem in English.  This translation comes from a poet known as Li Po. 

Second, Pound was one of the founding members, and perhaps the most important, of the early 20^th century poetic movement known as Imagism.  The key feature of imagism is that the poet creates an image to carry the meaning of his ideas, so that the emotion and abstract ideas are buried within the image.  Under ideal circumstances, nothing is explained, and what the reader is left to intuit is the meaning the image is suppose to project.  As you can see, this makes imagist poems difficult at times, but they can also be quite simple.  This particular poem by Pound is not particularly complicated.

Notice in the very first line how the image of bangs suggests a certain innocence and childlike inexperience.  Notice in the second stanza how the image of the bashful lowering of her head suggests a young woman’s submissiveness to a more powerful husband.  The third stanza’s image of dust mingling with dust shows the evolving love toward what at first must have been an unequal power allocation in the marriage.  In the final stanza, notice how the varying images weaved together suggest a complex emotional state in the young woman.

 

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Translated from the Chinese of Li Po [Rihaku]

by Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse;
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden --
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
               As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

Isn’t that a lovely poem?  The one place where Pound doesn’t use images is right at the core of that last stanza, lines 24 and 25: “They hurt me/I grow older.”  All the images really substantiate those feelings.  The poem is about growing older, starting with girlish bangs and ending with her taking on the challenge and assertion of meeting her husband at the river.

This site, Modern American Poetry, has varying comments and exegesis on the poem.  I can’t vouch for each comment’s accuracy, but from what I skimmed it doesn’t seem far astray.