William Carlos Williams

William Carlos William's biography says it all when it calls him a "no nonsense voice of the social man". His poetry also contains vivid imagery and subtleties that could be missed if one didn't read carefully. His poem The Young Housewife at its surface is about a man who drives by a house and sees a woman and later he sees her with various delivery men and he just drives by. One has to wonder how the man knows that the wife would be in a negligee at that time of day when she is inside. It actually seems like he has had a sexual relationship with this woman and as he drives by one day he thinks of her fondly and sexually. He then compares her to a fallen leaf and then says he drives over dried leaves crushing them. So perhaps the car is him sexually and he is a man that has had sex many times with wives and enjoys thinking about it. The Portrait of a Lady I did not really get at all. Finally there was The Descent. Carl Rapp wrote "Williams reaches a point at which the external world no longer seems to provide an adequate correlative for his desires and expectations. Williams finds a similar way of looking at defeat and loss that enables him to see those negative experiences as positive ones with implications not yet "realized."" I think these are great comments about Williams' s poem. In this poem he seems to be speaking about death but how it isn't really the end. He seems to believe that even after we die our memories still live on and that memory is the greatest thing we have from life. For instance "no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness" is saying that nothing is as good as our memory makes it. He is also saying that in death we realize the love is not moral and it will remain after life forever "endless and indestructible". Throughout this poem he is trying to say this that "no defeat is made up entirely of defeat" and even in death good can come.