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 20th 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.
