THE RED WHEELBARROW
And other poems
ALSO BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Asphodel
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
The Build-up
By Word of Mouth
The Collected Poems, Volume I: 1909–1939
The Collected Poems, Volume II: 1939–1962
The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams
The Doctor Stories
The Embodiment of Knowledge
Interviews with William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
In the Money
I Wanted to Write a Poem
Many Loves and Other Plays
Paterson
Pictures from Brueghel
A Recognizable Image
Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
Selected Poems
Something to Say
Spring and All
A Voyage to Pagany
White Mule
The William Carlos Williams Reader
Yes, Mrs. Williams
Contents
This Is Just to Say
The Red Wheelbarrow
Spring and All
The Dance
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
The Great Figure
Complaint
To a Poor Old Woman
Danse Russe
Poem
Nantucket
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
A Sort of a Song
The Young Housewife
These
To Elsie
The Yachts
To Waken an Old Lady
Portrait of a Lady
Between Walls
Burning the Christmas Greens
Queen-Anne’s-Lace
The Poem
Pastoral
The Last Words of My English Grandmother
The Term
The Dance
The Pot of Flowers
The Descent
Young Sycamore
The Poor
The Rose
Proletarian Portrait
Tract
The Ivy Crown
The Locust Tree in Flower
Landmarks
Cover
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
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 wildcarrot 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
X
The universality of things
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open
about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer’s
shoulders and his daughter’s
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small
yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable
distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics —
in the most practical frame of
brown celluloid made to
represent tortoiseshell —
A letter from the man who
wants to start a new magazine
made of linen
and he owns a typewriter —
July 1,1922
All this is for eyeglasses
to discover. But
they lie there with the gold
earpieces folded down
tranquilly Titicaca —
XIV
Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me
cutting my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair —
It’s just
a moment
he said, we die
every night —
And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on
bald death —
I told him
of the quartz
lamp
and of old men
with third
sets of teeth
to the cue
of an old man
who said
at the door —
Sunshine today!
for which
death shaves
him twice
a week
XX
The sea that encloses her young body
ula lu la lu
is the sea of many arms —
The blazing secrecy of noon is undone
and and and
the broken sand is the sound of love —
The flesh is firm that turns in the sea
O la la O
the sea that is cold with dead men’s tears —
Deeply the wooing that penetrated
to the edge of the sea
returns in the plash of the waves —
a wink over the shoulder
large as the ocean —
with wave following wave to the edge
Oom barroom
It is the cold of the sea
broken upon the sand by the force
of the moon —
In the sea the young flesh playing
floats with the cries of far off men
who rise in the sea
with green arms
to homage again the fields over there
where the night is deep —
la lu la lu
but lips too few
assume the new — marruu
Underneath the sea where it is dark
there is no edge
so two —
The Dance
In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
Complaint
They call me and I go.
It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
I smile, enter and
shake off the cold.
Here is a great woman
on her side in the bed.
She is sick,
perhaps vomiting,
perhaps laboring
to give birth to
a tenth child. Joy! Joy!
Night is a room
darkened for lovers,
through the jalousies the sun
has sent one gold needle!
I pick the hair from her eyes
and watch her misery
with compassion.
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, —
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, —
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
Nantucket
Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow
changed by white curtains —
Smell of cleanliness —
Sunshine of late afternoon —
On the glass tray
a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying — And the
immaculate white bed
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
A Sort of a Song
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
— through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
The Young Housewife
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
These
are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.
The year plunges into night
and the hear
t plunges
lower than night
to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought
that spins a dark fire —
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles
to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself — Not a ghost but
would be embraced — emptiness,
despair — (They
whine and whistle) among
the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,
the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused —
Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous
ears and eyes — for itself.
In this mine they come to dig — all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest
music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped
that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing — that is now stone.
To Elsie
The pure products of America
go crazy —
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure —
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags — succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum —
which they cannot express —
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round