The Locust Tree in Flower

(William Carlos Williams, twice appointed poet laureate,
in 1948 and 1952, but served neither time because of
a series of strokes)

THE LOCUST TREE IN FLOWER

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

(Springtime by John Henry Twachtman, 1853-1902,
American Impressionist painter)

Even as life begins anew in spring, grief still makes its way through the heart.

“For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. And I am going round in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?” ~ C. S. Lewis, from his book A Grief Observed

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.
Thirty five years
I lived with my husband.
The plum tree 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 turned 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.

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Children’s Games

(Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1529?-1569,
Dutch landscape painter; click on the image to see an
enlarged version)

Last October, we looked at ekphrasis, or literary commentary about a work of art. The poem today is one of the ten that William Carlos Williams wrote about Bruegel the Elder’s paintings. You can read more of these poems by clicking on his name in the “labels” below.

(To read poems by other poets on this theme of ekphrasis, click on the month of October in the archives in the column to the right.)

CHILDREN’S GAMES

I

This is a schoolyard
crowded
with children

of all ages near a village
on a small stream
meandering by

where some boys
are swimming
bare-ass

or climbing a tree in leaf
everything
is motion

elder women are looking
after the small
fry

a play wedding a
christening
nearby one leans

hollering
into
an empty hogshead

II

Little girls
whirling their skirts about
until they stand out flat

tops pinwheels
to run in the wind with
or a toy in 3 tiers to spin

with a piece
of twine to make it go
blindman's-buff follow the

leader stilts
high and low tipcat jacks
bowls hanging by the knees

standing on your head
run the gauntlet
a dozen on their backs

feet together kicking
through which a boy must pass
roll the hoop or a

construction
made of bricks
some mason has abandoned


III

The desperate toys
of children
their

imagination equilibrium
and rocks
which are to be

found
everywhere
and games to drag

the other down
blindfold
to make use of

a swinging
weight
with which

at random
to bash in the
heads about

them
Brueghel saw it all
and with his grim

humor faithfully
recorded
it

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Hunters in the Snow

(Hunters in the Snow, 1565, by Peter Bruegel the Elder,
1529?-1569, Dutch landscape painter)

In October, we looked at different examples of ekphrasis, or literary commentary about a work of art. (Scroll down to that month’s poems in the “blog archives” in the column to the right.)

The first verse below is one of ten poems that William Carlos Williams wrote about paintings by Bruegel the Elder.

THE HUNTERS IN THE SNOW

The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return

from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hunters lead in

their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix

between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire

that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond

the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen

a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

John Berryman’s poem about the same painting adds a more fateful scenario, in the future, viewed retrospectively.

WINTER LANDSCAPE

The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill: when all their company
Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

~ John Berryman (1917-1972), American poet

The Gift

(Adoration of the Magi by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-1669,
Dutch painter, printmaker, and draughtsman)

Today is the feast of Epiphany.

“The star they had seen in the East went before them, until it came and stood over the place where the child was. And when they saw the star they rejoiced exceedingly. And they entered the house, and they found the child with Mary his mother, and fell down and worshipped him. And when they had opened their treasures, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” ~ Matthew 2:10-11

THE GIFT

As the wise men of old brought gifts
guided by a star
to the humble birthplace

of the god of love,
the devils
as an old print shows
retreated in confusion.

What could a baby know
of gold ornaments
or frankincense and myrrh,
of priestly robes
and devout genuflections?

But the imagination
knows all stories
before they are told
and knows the truth of this one
past all defection.

The rich gifts
so unsuitable for a child
though devoutly proffered,
stood for all that love can bring.

The men were old
how could they know
of a mother’s needs
or a child’s
appetite?

But as they kneeled
the child was fed.

They saw it
and
gave praise!

A miracle
had taken place,
hard gold to love,
a mother’s milk!
before
their wondering eyes.

The ass brayed
the cattle lowed.
It was their nature.

All men by their nature give praise.
It is all
they can do.

The very devils
by their flight give praise.
What is death,
beside this?

Nothing. The wise men
came with gifts
and bowed down
to worship
this perfection.

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Fall of Icarus

The Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17 or 18) published his great poem Metamorphoses around A.D. 8. It was a 15-volume collection of Greek and Roman myths narrating the history of the world, from its beginnings up to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus.

One of the myths Ovid tells is the story of Icarus and his father, Daedalus, a great Athenian artisan. They were imprisoned on Crete. To escape to Sicily, Daedalus made two pairs of wings from feathers and wax. He cautioned his son not to fly too close over the sea, the feathers would get drenched, and not to fly too close to the sun, the wax would melt. But Icarus climbed too high and the wax melted and he fell to the sea and drowned.

Pieter Bruegel (or Brueghel) the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is this Dutch painter's version of the well-known tale. He includes details from the description of the scene in Metamorphoses:

Some angler catching his fish with a quivering rod,
Or a shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough . . .


(Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, 1529?-1569)

W. H. Auden wrote a poem about this picture after a visit to the Museum of Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1938. He begins by alluding to two other paintings by Bruegel:


(The Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)


(Christ Carrying the Cross by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

In these three paintings, Bruegel shows how life goes on for the crowds — even in the midst of great drama. In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the ploughman and the others are oblivious to the flailing limbs of the drowning man (at the bottom right corner of the painting). In The Census of Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph arrive to record their names, just before “the miraculous birth” of Jesus. At the center of Christ Carrying the Cross, there is great suffering as “the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”

Witnesses can be blind to the human suffering around them. But the artist pays attention.

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

~ W. H. Auden (1907-1973), English-born American poet and essayist

William Carlos Williams also wrote about this painting of Icarus, one of ten poems he composed about the works of Bruegel the Elder. (See the post of September 10, Grain Harvest.)

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

the edge of the sea
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

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

The Great Figure

(The Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth, 1883-1935,
American artist)

William Carlos Williams is well-known for his many poems that comment on works of art, especially the paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

There was one instance when the direction went the other way: a painter responded to one of Williams’ poems.

“Once on a hot July day coming back exhausted from the Post Graduate Clinic,” Williams wrote in his Autobiography, “I dropped in as I sometimes did at Marsden's studio on Fifteenth Street for a talk, a little drink maybe and to see what he was doing. As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.”

The artist Charles Demuth created a watercolor inspired by Williams’ poem. With its linear flashes of color and the movement of the numbers, the image does suggest the energy of the fire truck that raced by that day. Demuth’s intention, however, was to produce an abstract tribute to the poet. Note the letters spelling out “BILL” near the top left corner and a faint “CARLOS” under the top horizontal line of the largest number 5, and close to the bottom, in very small letters, the initials of both the artist and the poet.

THE GREAT FIGURE

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Grain Harvest

(Grain Harvest by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

Pieter Bruegel, or Breughel, the Elder (1529?-1569) was an artist from the Netherlands who painted landscapes of rural and village life with great detail and a touch of satire. His son and his grandson, both also called Pieter, followed in his footsteps.

This poem is one of ten that William Carlos Williams wrote about Bruegel the Elder’s paintings.

THE CORN HARVEST

Summer!
the painting is organized
about a young

reaper enjoying his
noonday rest
completely

relaxed
from his morning labors
sprawled

in fact sleeping
unbuttoned
on his back

the women
have brought him his lunch
perhaps

a spot of wine
they gather gossiping
under a tree

whose shade
carelessly
he does not share the

resting
center of
their workday world

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Of History and Hope

(from The Migration Series, No. 58, 1941 by Jacob
Lawrence, American painter, 1917-2000)

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America,” states the preamble to the Constitution.

OF HISTORY AND HOPE

We have memorized America

how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands — oh, rarely in a row —
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become —
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit — it isn’t there yet —
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

~ Miller Williams, born 1930, American poet and translator