Forgiving William Carlos Williams

Until my freshman year at Willamette University, the only poem I'd read by William Carlos Williams was "The Red Wheelbarrow." Now it may just be the way it had been forced upon me in high school, but I hate the poem, and for a long time I hated the man who'd created it. It simply struck me as overly pretentious in its poetics. "Look at how I dispense with rhyme, meter, and any aspirations of Romantic transcendence" the poem gloats. "Isn't that just thoroughly modern?"

As a student, my job was to notice how modern the poem was.

Then I read the following poem and all was forgiven. It's a wonderful dismantling of poems praising female beauty, going back to the Petrarchan sonneteers (there's your dash of literary history for the day). I hope you enjoy it, and that you, too, can learn to see others with fresh eyes (or something like that).

"Portrait of a Lady"

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze--or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
--as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes--below
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--
Which shore?--
the sand clings to my lips--
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

1920