A lingering Image From Grad School . . .

The Red Wheelbarrow
 - William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


from: Spring and All, Copyright 1923.

January

 - William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

Conversations With Poetry . . . Or Between Poets . . . Or Poems . . .

Have you ever read poems written in response to other poems or poets?

The first two that I think of are, Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and Sir Walter Raleigh's The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd.

You remember. Marlowe's speaker is like, "Aw, come on. You know you wanna. It'd be so great." - for six stanzas.

Then Raleigh's speaker is like, "Uh. Not." - for her own six stanzas.

Now, that's an exchange about as old as dirt.

But did you know that Raleigh wasn't the only poet to take up the pen in response to Marlowe? I know of seven (that's 7!) other poems which carry the conversation forward! Some answer Marlowe directly while others carry on the discussion among themselves.

I actually only knew about five of them, but then I found this wonderful little anthology, Conversation Pieces: poems that talk to other poems. It's packed full of lyric poets addressing "someone not in the room," and other poets giving a voice to that silent someone (1). It also contains a brief preface by Billy Collins.

John Donne gives us The Bait, where we see the woman as the bait and all the men as fishes drawn to her; or Jesus as the "fisher of men." Those silly metaphysical poets and their conceits . . .

Various other poets responding to Marlowe include: C. Day Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Ogden Nash, W.D. Snodgrass, Douglas Crase, And Greg Delanty. I've managed a link to most of them, but let me offer the original, the inspiration right here:

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
- Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

(1) Conversation Pieces: poems that talk to other poems. (P.18)

Approach of Winter

     - William Carlos Williams

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine,—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.

Spring and All

   by William Carlos Williams

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
grip down and begin to awaken

Copyright 1962 by William Carlos Williams. 

Photo source.

The Uses Of Poetry

by William Carlos Williams

I've fond anticipation of a day
O'erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,

Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway.

For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string

And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy's transforming giant wing,
To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.

THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR THE UNQUANTIFIABLE

from ASPHODEL, THAT GREENY FLOWER
- William Carlos Williams

'My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.'