This is just to say

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19244&date=2017-05-21&pageid=1

       ‘This is just to say’

‘This is just to say’ is William Carlos William’s most famous poem. Who can convert everyday matter such as a slip or conscious trickery in quotidian domestic life into poetry! That’s WCW for us - a man who otherwise led a contrived life, working as a full time paediatrician, on the go making house calls at all times of the day in the first half of 20^th century America. He lived in the suburbs of New Jersey.  His was a conventional life interwoven with flashes of artistic talent, leavening the humdrum to sweetness and joy.

We are struck by the precise imagery of WCW’s poems. Nouns such as plums and icebox; adjectives such as sweet, cold and delicious, and verbs such as eaten, saving and forgive, combine to etch an episodic scene in the day to day turn of married life. A slice to savour, peep voyeuristically and imagine the sexual underpinnings of marital bliss.

Overriding it is the consistent sensibility of the poet to morph the mundane into something extraordinary and overwhelming like a still life painting!

There are numerous theories about this poem (it’s the fall of Adam and Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, or about repressed sexuality or  an apology for interfering with the schedule of a housewife’s culinary plan) which itself go to make this poem profound. It’s astonishing that something so simple can invoke such varied responses and engage the reader completely. The poem also incites abundant hilarity.

The next poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is an indelible image to think about. The varied connotation arise from the juxtaposition of colours in the poem, the image of the farm with domesticated poultry, the incurring workload, the abundance of nature, coming together of man - animal and machine, the necessity and miracle of simple machines and other endless pictures.

There is no denying the fact that WCW was an imagist poet. The concise and clear images that his lines put together are undoubtedly colourful, but realistic. The following poems are studies in this regard.

             

In these poems the subject is a fair woman. Her dilemma is loss of youth and vitality in the first poem. In the second she is coveted by a solitary man in a car (the poet) for her beauty and mystery.  The poet is well aware of the societal barriers which separate them, but cannot help the stirrings of desire for the pretty woman behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house.  What better picture of a beautiful small town romance that is never ending!

WCW sought his own idiom of poetry – free unrhymed verse and common vocabulary contrary to his contemporaries Ezra pound and TS Eliot. Their epic poems really rattled WCW, and he wanted to cut away from their formalized and stylistic tradition of writing poetry.  His own epic poem ‘Paterson’ imagines the city to be a man, and its progress with technology written in everyday American English.  

Now here is a poem that showcases his skill to reflect paintings. On a rainy night WCW came upon a noisy fire engine with the figure 5 flashing, tearing through the flooded street. The lasting impression of this encounter resulted in the poem ‘The Great Figure’. The poem was adapted into a modernist, cubist painting by his friend Charles Demuth.

WCW ‘s journey with painting also resulted in ekphrastic poems based on the works of  the Flemish painter, Pieter Brueghel, called ‘Pictures from Brueghel and other poems’. The reader can look up these poems and read them with the snapshots of paintings side by side.

What joy!