William Carlos Williams

“ There is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will. Of the air of the coldest room it will seem to build the hottest passions. Mozart would dance with his wife, whistling his own tune to keep the cold away and Villon ceased to write upon his Petit Testament only when the ink was frozen. But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with other matter. ”

“ At which I answered her, “Marvelous old queen,
Grant me power to catch something of this day's
Air and sun into your service!
That these toilers after peace and after pleasure
May turn to you, worshippers at all hours!”
But she sniffed upon the words warily—
Yet I persisted, watching for an answer:
“To you, horrible old woman,
Who know all fires out of the bodies
Of all men that walk with lust at heart! ”

“ Who holds Lancelot to have been a morose fellow,
Dolefully brooding over the events which had naturally to follow
The high time of his deed with Guinevere.
He has a sick historical sight, if I judge rightly,
To believe any such thing as that ever occurred.
But, by the god of blood, what else is it that has deterred
Us all from an out and out defiance of fear
But this same perdamnable miserliness,
Which cries about our necks how we shall have less and less
Than we have now if we spend too wantonly? ”

“ But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. ”

“ SPRING STRAINS In a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds
crowded erect with desire against
the sky—
tense blue-grey twigs
slenderly anchoring them down, drawing
them in—
two blue-grey birds chasing
a third struggle in circles, angles,
swift convergings to a point that bursts
instantly!
Vibrant bowing limbs
pull downward, sucking in the sky
that bulges from behind, plastering itself
against them in packed rifts, rock blue
and dirty orange! ”

“ 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. ”

“ My second spring—painted
a virgin—in a blue aureole
sitting on a three-legged stool,
arms crossed—
she is intently serious,
⁠and still
watching an angel
with coloured wings
half kneeling before her—
and smiling—the angel's eyes
holding the eyes of Mary
as a snake's holds a bird's.
On the ground there are flowers,
trees are in leaf. ”

“ Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!
It is not a color.
It is summer!
It is the wind on a willow,
the lap of waves, the shadow
under a bush, a bird, a bluebird,
three herons, a dead hawk
rotting on a pole—
Clear yellow! ”

“ But in me, more sensitive, marvelous old queen
It sank deep into the blood, that I rose upon
The tense air enjoying the dusty fight!
Heavy drink were the low, sloping foreheads
The flat skulls with the unkempt black or blond
⁠hair,
The ugly legs of the young girls, pistons
Too powerful for delicacy!
The women's wrists, the men's arms, red
Used to heat and cold, to toss quartered beeves
And barrels, and milk-cans, and crates of fruit! ”

“ PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR The birches are mad with green points
the wood’s edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething—No, no, no.
The birches are opening their leaves one
by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold
and separate, one by one. Slender tassels
hang swaying from the delicate branch tips—
Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word.
Black is split at once into flowers. ”

“ Oh quarrel whether ’twas Pope Clement raped Persephone or—did the devil wear a mitre in that year? Come, there’s much use in being thin on a windy day if the cloth’s cut well. And oak leaves will not come on maples, nor birch trees either—that is provided—, but pass it over, pass it over.
A woman of good figure, if she be young and gay, welcomes the wind that presses tight upon her from forehead to ankles revealing the impatient mountains and valleys of her secret desire. The wind brings release to her. But the wind is no blessing to all women. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After the youth of all cities, drunk
With the sight of thy archness! All the youth
That come to you, you having the knowledge
Rather than to those uninitiate—
To you, marvelous old queen, give me always
A new marriage—”
⁠But she laughed loudly—
“A new grip upon those garments that brushed me
In days gone by on beach, lawn, and in forest! ”

“ All is confusion, yet, it comes from a hidden desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination, a will to accord two instruments in a duet.
But one does not attempt by the ingenuity of the joiner to blend the tones of the oboe with the violin. On the contrary the perfections of the two instruments are emphasized by the joiner; no means is neglected to give to each the full color of its perfections. It is only the music of the instruments which is joined and that not by the woodworker but by the composer, by virtue of the imagination. ”

“ Imperceptibly your self shakes free in all its brutal significance, feels its subtle power renewed and abashed at its covered lustihood breaks to the windows and draws back before the sunshine it sees there as before some imagined figure that would be there if—ah if—But for a moment your hand rests upon the palace window sill, only for a moment.
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It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater. It is not just to walk out of a November evening bare headed and with white hair in the wind. ”

“ Sagging breasts and protruding stomachs,
Rasping voices, filthy habits with the hands.
“Nowhere you! Everywhere the electric!
“Ugly, venemous, gigantic!
Tossing me as a great father his helpless
Infant till it shriek with ecstasy
And its eyes roll and its tongue hangs out!—
“I am at peace again, old queen, I listen clearer
⁠now.” ”

“ Weave away, dead fingers, the darkies are dancing in Mayaguez—all but one with the sore heel and sugar cane will soon be high enough to romp through. Haia! leading over the ditches, with your skirts flying and the devil in the wind back of you—no one else. Weave away and the bitter tongue of an old woman is eating, eating, eating venomous words with thirty years mould on them and all shall be eaten back to honeymoon’s end. ”

“ The rose-tree will have its donor
even though he give stingily.
The gift of some endures
ten years, the gift of some twenty
and the gift of some for the time a
great house rots and is torn down.
Some give for a thousand years to men of
one face, some for a thousand
to all men and some few to all men
while granite holds an edge against
the weather. ”

“ In Holland at daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one sees the housemaids beating rugs before the small houses of such a city as Amsterdam, sweeping, scrubbing the low entry steps and polishing doorbells and doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman with a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a deserted canal to some late loiterer trudging aimlessly on beneath the gas lamps. ”