Doing It With The R’ s: An attempt at a close reading of Williams’ roaring sound system and meaning shift in “To Elsie”

XVIII

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

with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor’s family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

“Pay attention to the sounds,” William Carlos Williams advises the young poet Harold Norse many times during their ten-year correspondence.

Williams practiced what he preached. In “To Elsie,” so-named in later collected editions and originally the eighteenth section (“XVIII”) of his 1923 collection Spring and All, it is sound, in particular the r-sound, that dominates the sense of the poem. The r-sound is a bellwether indicator or tone in the poem and its resigned movement or surrender to metaphor by the final stanzas.

Of course it’s impossible to pinpoint how the sound of a poem coincides with or adds to its meaning. The job of a critic’s close reading, it seems to me, is to get as close to pin-pointing it as possible, to take as many liberties without feeling ashamed of one’s self while he or she looks closely at the words and the sounds themselves. To readers who may think this reading will be too fetishistic or reductionist in focusing solely on the sounds of this poem, take this as my apology.

I think it’s fair to say that, in the broadest of strokes, “To Elsie” describes scenarios and vignettes that build and support the poem’s thesis, the opening statement, “The pure products of America\go crazy.” The poem moves away from what I would call its initial objectivity and, by the end, employs devices to escape from its own literal logic and end with the metaphor, “No one/to witness/and adjust, no one to drive the car.”

And all this is accomplished in no small part by the sounds.

Unchained

Pinpointing how this happens by poem’s end is one thing that has driven me to read and re-read this poem over the years, and to teach it in classes every chance I get.

As a poet and critic, I’m a sucker for the manifesto statement, in particular when it’s done in at the end of a poem. Textbooks examples include Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“You must change your life”) and Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (“I have wasted my life”).

To me, one of the surprising elements in “To Elsie” is that it actually begins with a cannon fire-thesis statement. Where to go from “The pure products of America/go crazy”?

One thought I have is that the poem’s shift to metaphor by the closing stanza is effective simply because of its thunderous contrast to the opening. But I have come to think it’s also from the flurry of sounds, the context inversions, line length and breaks—in short, so many of the effective devices of Williams’ that makes this happen.

The poem’s shifts, and the alternate meanings they allow, however, are accomplished primarily with the effect of sound. It’s a rather Empsonian notion, to be sure, or what critic James Guetti’s idea “word-music.” By poem’s end, noun-adjective inversions are the main cause of ambiguity. On a mechanical level, pronoun reference, irregular shortened second lines in a triadic stanza assist this regular consonantal sound system and ease the transition to metaphor by the poem’s end.

First product placement

A word about “products.” We can say, for instance, that a “product” can be simply something manufactured; there is a meaning of “byproduct,” that is, a thought or result. Later in the poem, we can come to think of it as a child out of wedlock. That a product can be “pure” may be flattering—“free from evil or sin.” But can also be read as classifying the subject in a certain class or type—“mere, nothing but.”

There is indeed this tension in diction throughout the poem, especially in the opening stanzas. A word as genteel as “pure”—“pure as the driven snow”—will alternate with commercial and strikingly American words as “products” and the colloquial “go crazy.”

Williams’ plainspoken tone in this poem and others, I think, makes the task of finding ambiguity more difficult. The word “promiscuity,” for instance, directs the reader to one meaning—that is, having sex with many people—as well as “composed of many elements.” Its context could supports both readings.

“Ribbed” once again cuts both ways. The word means “knitted together,” which, if we think of the separate parts that are knitted, indicates also a fragmentation. There’s also the sound-meaning reading of just plain “ribs,” a corporeality surely not lost on the rib-touching Dr. Williams.

Pronoun trouble

In stanzas 5 to 9, Williams’ placing and reference of the two uses of “its” leads us back to the “pure products” and everything along the way. (I first called this “awkward” in previous drafts, in an attempt to get a grip on the sense of the poem right away; bad idea.)

The references to “its” in stanza 2 and 3 does invite the pronoun reference back to “pure products of America.” The same case holds for the “its” that precedes stanza 3’s “deaf mutes, thieves\old names,” with an ambiguity-producing lack of serial comma and an abrupt line break.

The poem moves from the exterior to interior world, and from the plural to singular, and depends on these multiple sound-meaning readings in these opening lines to expand to an authoritative, even curmudgeonly tone, while the reader deciphers meaning in the midst of the poem’s clinical, albeit well-meaning, intentionality.

Doin’ it with some R’s

So now that I’ve tried to point out some ambiguity, which isn’t really that hard to find in the poem, we can move on to what I see as the soundtrack to this ambiguity, the sound system. By far, the r-sound is the dominant consonant in the poem. The assonance used at the same syllabic points, preceded by a hard consonant and driving the r-sound to a grinding resolution, I would say, is “To Elsie”’s feminine rhyme scheme.

It is often to the point of distraction: 55 of the 66 lines have at least one r-sound; 14 have two; the first line has three r-sounds. Only one of the 22 stanzas, stanza 21, lacks any r-sounds at all. The byproduct of this predominant r-sound roar is a gritting of the teeth, the very position of our jaws pushing the meaning of the poem forward.

Something else: Most r-sounds appear on accented syllables. It’s not until stanza 4 is there an unstressed r-sound, and never breaks again until stanza 14’s “Elsie” introduces the poem’s emotional center. After stanza 15, the r-sound is tempered but still extant.

Even with a context-driven ambiguity that assigns disparate meanings to the words or terms, there is a clear sense of the poem supporting a thesis—an aim for a balanced tone that is tenuous at best. But what really happens from stanzas 5 to 18 is that the ‘product’s purity’ is sullied in description and images of a detached determinism.

It starts off slowly. Stanzas 5 to 9 follow-up and clarify with two more thesis statements: one, the absence of “peasant traditions to give them character,” and two, “slatterns” who “cannot express” a “numbed terror.” Both emphasize accouterment, wooing—“but flutter and flaunt\sheer rags”—by unattractive, slovenly people. Despite the rather pathetic picture it draws, it nonetheless translates in an objective manner. The verbs “flutter and flaunt” contrasts genteel and colloquial—“flutter” eyelashes and “if you got it, flaunt it.”

And did you count all those r-sounds?

Slatterns or sluts?

The poem’s second and third statements present simpler, atavistic images that are less ambiguous than ‘going crazy.’ The word “slatterns,” a “slovenly woman,” in most cases, could seem to express irritation to the speaker, without knowledge to even express their emotions and lack “peasant tradition.” The question of whether “numbed terror” is meant to be a result of “succumbing” or a result of living among wild bushes also makes for ambiguity.

The meaning of succumb—“to give way to something overpowering”—is also ambiguous in this context, which leads to a sense of inevitability and of pity for that which is succumbed. Both readings are given equal weight, and so our sound-meaning reading is of both a nonconsensual encounter, or “succumbing,” along with a lesser, perhaps stretched reading of an artificial wildlife tableau.

Several other context- and sound-meaning-driven ambiguities appear in these stanzas. The plainspoken scansion—of course we have to mention Williams’ “variable foot” here, correct?—and line break finesses a focus on “gauds,” which by its end-stop and accent also invites “gaudy.” The ambiguity of “tricked” supports an interpretation of prostitution. “Trick” could read as a sexual liaison—as in to “turn a trick”—as well as to ‘sport’ or wear, in this case jewelry, “gauds.” The example of wild bushes is “choke-cherry,” which in this scene of course begs the sound-meaning of “choke,” buttressed by the previous “numbed terror.”

The scene in question is by no means Edenic: choke cherry is a poisonous wild bush, viburnum a shrub. The bushes introduced in this nature scene—“viburnum,” “choke cherry”—embody, respectively, a Latinate clinicality and a sound-meaning-driven, violent residue. This wildlife cliché, however inverted, parallels the ending stanzas’ other goldenrod nature scene. Again, we readers are ‘paying attention to the sounds.’

Moving forward in the middle

The poem uses several more devices to keep it moving forward. The regular use of the infinitive “to,” along with that prompting em-dash, leaves readers expectant even when a thought is completed, is one device. There’s also the short lines in the middle of the poem’s three-line stanzas.

Beginning with stanza 5, the lopped-off second line presses the poem forward, invites ambiguities to break up thought, to force the mind’s eye to fulfillment. The abbreviated second line has already forced attention to “gauds” in stanza 6; it also lends time, for instance, to mull over these double-meanings (stanza 9’s “emotion”) but perhaps ignore others (“character” from stanza 8 is passed over by the next lines’ “but”). The short second lines are not autonomous thoughts, unlike the stanzas’ first and third lines. The dramatic, spatial effect of stanza 5’s shorter line embeds and amplifies the crusty, colloquial phrase between the genteel and expository top and bottom lines:

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

I’ve asked myself a couple times: Can this poem withstand a reading where some lines and word choices are more “genteel” than others? Can this intent also succeed with another intent to support the poem’s first two lines?

I’m still asking these questions. The above stanza, after all, refers to “slatterns,” a rather genteel, dismissive way of putting things—the speaker, after all, doesn’t use “slut” or “whore,” both of which would be more easily associated with being “bathed\in filth,” the latter, after all, with an r-sound.

Elsie’s volta

The impression I have in the poem is broken by both disparate language and a deliberately truncated second line. This tinkering with form stacks relatively bloated third lines with the next stanza’s first. The reading eye begins to regard the second line as vestigial, in particular stanzas 10 to 13, where the straightforward and descriptive intention of the poem starts to shed away, focusing on a group:

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash if Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

The shift toward the “girl” and “she” of these stanzas brings with it a less context-driven ambiguity. The language, I think, becomes less dense because of that refocusing. I think of it as a safety valve to the previously more harsh, concretized language of ‘slatterns bathed in filth.’ It is also a shift in tone and intention while the ambiguity perseveres—there is truly harsh detail in the words “desolate,” “disease,” and “murder.”

Shift to metaphor

It is in these stanzas where details shift to metaphor by poem’s end—the “isolate specks of understanding” and the perhaps aped figurative expression, “no one to drive the car.” The phrase “with a dash of Indian blood” retrieves the atavistic element, the ethnographic “peasant” classification of stanza 5. It is also another mixing: “dash” as if the poem were a recipe for a “product.” We can see how “hemmed” and “ribbed” might fit into this prosody.

Stanza 11’s “girl,” whose best-case scenario is working in the “hard-pressed” suburbs—she is, after all, ‘thrown up’—is introduced by two qualifiers—“so desolate\so hemmed round\with disease or murder.” The stresses and sound of “hard-pressed” echoes “hemmed round,” which describes “suburbs,” the place to which the poem’s subject will be “rescued.” Again, note the r-sound cacophony in these words. For this reader, the sense is that of orchestra of phonemic ringing.

One thought:

In these parallels, the poem offers both sides of the story, perhaps a justification for both the genteel and the harsher participants of the poem’s situation. But the changes of setting, the progress from a general American vistas, to the outdoors, to the “suburbs,” places the poem in more palpable, essayistic terms.

The language begins to reflect this after these stanzas, and moves toward the introduction of metaphor. The standoffish “so hemmed round\with disease or murder” again mitigates harsh realities with word choice, in particular verb forms, and drives the sense that we are presented with a well-balanced portrait. The word “hemmed” echoes stanza 2’s “ribbed,” in the sense of knitting together and creates a tone of balance and order. We are approaching the poem’s center, stanza 14’s “Elsie.” Stanzas 14 to 18 present one face, and the details will turn to metaphor and ambiguity driven by inversion.

Rescue me

It can be said that “rescued,” which refers to the travails of all the poems’ subjects of the opening nine stanzas, is our first purely subjective word of the poem. Until now, we have had a third-person impersonal narrator, with no investment in the outcome of our subjects. With the introduction of “rescued,” there is a departure from the objectivity stated in the poem’s first three assertions. We may have not noticed the subjectivity of “rescued,” since it is carried out by an “agent,” a commercial term carried on a lopped-off second line, and deflates the feeling. It’s part of a deus ex machina in the poem personified by the last line’s—notice our r-sounds—“car.”

Broken brains

In stanzas 14 to 19 ambiguity returns in full bloom. The genteel “voluptuous” refers to “water,” rather than “hips” and “breasts,” which are “addressed” to “jewelry.” This is odd sense-wise, since usually jewelry is assigned to the body, not vice versa. There is an associative ambiguity in “water” and “broken,” indicating childbirth—“her water has broken.” And so pronoun reference becomes ambiguous again. The personal context and setting of the poem must now carry the emotional weight. Stanza 15’s “us,” the third-person impersonal, you could say, includes, or implicates, the readers.

Whereas in the previous stanzas, the scenarios of a way out—“marriage,” or a wardship of the state—are presented in a rather off-hand manner, the subject is called upon to speak for herself in stanza 15. The water “expressing with broken\brain” is, in fact, the first verifiable metaphor of the poem, which works off of an inversion in a place previously reserved in the poem for contextual, sound-meaning, or technical ambiguity.

That stanza break from 14 to 15 gives a feeling of speechlessness, a lack of candor or eloquence. Indeed, the field of compositional play, the stanza space between “broken” and brain” seems to evoke the reluctant move to metaphor, the poem tinkering with its own form; it dominates its syntax, but nonetheless grinds down with those r-sounds.

“Yadda yadda yadda skyshit” (old student comment on poem)

And here also is our first personification—“an excrement of some sky.” The inversions, the misplaced nouns with the logical modifier, occur overtly, driven by a single subject, and contrast to the previously general ambiguities. When the “we” becomes “prisoners,” the entire sense has shifted: the poem had attempted to describe the condition of “pure products”; now, it is an all-encompassing statement, which includes “us.”

A control of context, then, supported by ambiguous content and at times distracting form, drives all of these ambiguities to critical mass. Some questions remain. The term “the truth about us” passes over so easily in the poem as to sound benign, when it is exactly the truth that would help us all. The r-sound of “truth” glides away, and perhaps shouldn’t even be counted in the scorecard at the beginning of this analysis, but there it is. Just as the poem’s Elsie needs a way out, a way to find meaning, so too, it seems, do the ambiguities.

The real solution is “the truth about us,” a balance, one that perhaps “pure products” can only detect, but cannot express. What is focused on toward the closing stanzas, however, is metaphor. And how does the metaphor play out for meaning? This is perhaps where Williams’ notion that poems are made of words, not feelings, takes over.

The description “an excrement of some sky” cannot pass over us as a juxtaposition of genteel and colloquial, and leave it at that. It is too potent a contrast with the anatomical inventory of Elsie taken by “rich young men with fine eyes.” But the metaphors of the poem are flying by so fast and furiously, and the r-sounds are starting to fade.

Note, for instance, it is “some” sky that is described, not “the” sky. This relates a feeling of fate, confusion, a deliberate closeting of a literal situation. In a second mention of “isolate,” the same scenarios hold true. It is the poem’s last escape:

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

My earlier point regarding the deterministic stanzas 5 to 8, combined with a deadpan tone, is sustained with the meaning of “destined\to hunger until we eat filth.” As the poem ends, it echoes its earlier points, and so the reader may attempt to go for a parallel reading.

It’s a good instinct. Anyone who picks up the second mention of a word as strong as “filth,“ for instance, cannot escape such an attempt. Here stanza 6’s “gauds,” after all, arguably resonates with stanza 16’s fulfilling “jewelry.” Both “filth” and “jewelry” are assigned to second-line embedding. And the first mention of “filth,” is a very real filth, a workplace dirt, while the second is metaphorical.

The second mention of “isolate,” as in “isolate flecks of understanding,” also metaphorical, is also the last clinical assertion of the poem. The qualifying “only” perhaps indicates the last shedding of authoritative tone, the poem realizing the aforementioned “truth” is just as unattainable. The quest of the reader for a literal meaning, it could be said, is just as pathetic as the subjects’ search for a character, as straining the imagination for deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

When the poem introduces the element of insanity, of `going crazy,’ the everyday speech of that utterance did not truly transmute the urgency that the end of the poem relates: “Somehow\it seems to destroy us.” Again, a qualifier, “Somehow,” softens the tone a bit, and what is described is a metaphorical destroying, with “no one to drive the car.” But images by poems’ end seem more apocalyptic, more like a traditional poem-essay that states all is not well in the firmament.

The biggest clue to the meaning of this poem remains Dr. Williams’ straightforward advice to Norse—“pay attention to sounds.” There is an almost hollow absence of r-sound activity in these last stanzas, returning with “destroy” and “drive the car.” After 25 r-sound-less syllables — the only stanzaic r-sound break and longest syllabic—the r-sound leitmotif returns, and both appear on accented syllables.

The poem ends with a hard r-sound end-bracket closing the assonant harshness of the poem: “degraded prisoners,” “slatterns,” even the “hard-pressed\house in the suburbs.” There is a silence in stanzas 19 to 21 that erases everything but the “isolate flecks” of understanding, the last-gasp metaphor of making sense of the world. To “drive the car” can be taken literally— “no man to drive the car” or “no one able to drive the car.” Granted, it can be used metaphorically, an extension of “witness and adjust”— “no one to pass the news of it all, the flecks of understanding, the truth about us.” These readings are not triggered by ambiguity; rather, they are the possibilities of a metaphor with multiple meanings. The poem works because it knows when to break off the cacophony of contextual ambiguity by its end. Although it may seem gradual, the movement to the ending stanzas’ silence and metaphor is quick and efficient.

Appendix 1. An afterward, a self-study, a reading of a reading

To be sure, my rather hyper analysis has limitations.

First, at points I presume an idea of “proper” form, most notably analyzing the “shortened” second line, and the assumption that it should be as long as the first and second. Second, I base on what Empson calls the “cult of Pure Sound”—a large and powerful cult among poets and critics, to be sure, but a cult nonetheless. There is also a presupposition of “normal” or “expected” images, and it was the poem that contained deviations. Who is to say that?

Finally, there was an assumption of the “clinical intention” of the poem, perhaps not connecting fully with the “sense,” the meaning or prose paraphrase. But this shift in tone by poem’s end, I feel, is built on the question of tone and intention, that the poem moves into a use of metaphor.

Of course, there is no way, for instance, to “read” a shortened second line into the meaning of any poem. The best point that can be achieved in examining the poem’s mechanical aspects, I think, is how best it accents a point of meaning made in the poem.

The desire to address mechanics becomes especially tempting, therefore, when as Robert Creeley says “the form is a proper extension of the content,” as I think it is in “To Elsie.” One idea of form—what Lewis Turco calls the “Williamsian triversan stanza”—becomes a very real distraction in a desire to make an objective reading of Williams (217). I see the Williams breaking his own rules in his own poem, “tinkering” with his form—that is, of one thought or breath per line, one complete thought or sentence per stanza. I am presuming all the while, of course. These are just a few.

Appendix 2. The poem itself

Dealing with only the poem at hand, I felt the need to make particular points with the poem’s short second line in mind, and how that contributed to the poem as a whole. My point was not to demonstrate that the second line was an integral part of the poem, nor that a poem made about these topics perhaps is best expressed in such-and-such a form. Rather, I devised a minor argument about the second lines’ contribution to the poem’s larger ambiguity. The poem’s rushed, shortened second lines, I still think, does indeed push the reading eye either forward or to land squarely on that line, depending on how much information is dispensed.

I find that second lines of the poem’s stanzas, more often than not, contain “harsher” words than the rest of the stanza. It was significant that the reader might stop and gawk at the word, and move forward. I still have a notion that last two stanzas’ equal length lines (the second and third line of stanza 21 and the first two of the final stanza 22) open up the grammar or sense of the poem. It was a direct statement with only the words themselves left to be ambiguous, which, I felt, made them metaphor. My reading held on for some other reason other than form to contribute to its point. One can only assume it was the sense, the meaning of the poem. Hell, let’s say it out loud: The poem’s feeling.

Appendix 3. Pure product placement, part two

A breakdown of mechanical elements in the poem is, as I. A. Richards says regarding a study of rhythm, “an enterprise of doubtful value” (341). A mechanical reading `looks at the buttons and lapels’ rather than the whole suit,’ the meaning of the poem, the poem’s prosody (341). To look at the “truncated” second line, then, calling it a “tinkering of form,” assumed that there was a form with which to tinker, and that would have been the standard to go by. As a technical presupposition, attention to the form of the poem in and of itself had peculiar pitfalls in a reading of this poem. The meaning itself became a presupposition considering the poem’s overall page presentation.

In The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech, a study of the influence of Cubist painting on Williams, Bram Dijikstra writes that each sentence becomes an “object,” another piece in a series (72-73).

In the future, I would like to work this into my reading to make some of my visual and “forward” points clearer. But it’s hard not to get fetishistic about Williams—making that visual and sound connection is so potent, as potent as Hopkins—and attempts at paraphrasing these poems prove difficult.

Indeed, I use a “Pure Sound” reading an r-sound motif as feminine rhyme, for instance, by which I mean that the r-sounds appeared in regularly accented and syllabically similar places. Readers come to expect this atonal scheme and leads to my pointing out its absence, as in stanza 15’s introduction of Elsie and the closing stanza’s r-soundless silence.

Finally, attempts were made to make actual sense of the poem through paraphrasing, certain things were expected and held as “normal.” A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan’s notes in the 1986 The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams regarding the poem read as follows:

Elsie was a retarded nursemaid from the State Orphanage who worked for the Williams family after Kathy McBride left…Beside the title “To Elsie” in Thirwall’s copy of CEP [Collected Earlier Poems] is the note: “Pyromaniac. Subject of story of robbers—gagged and silver hidden. Succeeded Kate McDonnell.” (504)

So what can be gleaned from this note? There is a real-life Elsie. Fair enough. In the poem, “Elsie” was “rescued” and sent to work in some `hard pressed doctor’s family in the suburbs.’ In other words, these scenarios did not seem at all idyllic or attractive, something a person “rescued” would expect.

In addition, the poem’s imagistic opening stanzas did not portray the plight of the subjects per se, choosing instead to focus on “gauds” and so forth, and a general condition in “America.” This leaves a focus on Elsie, her qualifying introduction, and her ‘rescue.’

I remain aware of this, and rhetorically ask about them in successive readings, and whenever I assign this to my composition students, there are the inevitable reality TV-influenced verité questions of who this person was, did she exist. The Voices and Visions documentary doesn’t help, with its literal reading of the poem.

Whenever words like “genteel,” “colloquial,” “clinical,” and “ethnography” are used, it is dependent on major assumptions of the motivation of the poem. An ignorance of the prosody seems to be necessary the very moment when one of those words were mentioned. And it is helpful to assign purposes to strains in the poem: the sexual element, the cataloguing of people, the poem’s examples of “pure products.” There is a definite movement to an absence of clinicality by the poem’s closing stanzas. The tone of the poem is distractingly authoritative, and had to be countered almost with a syntax just as authoritative to make analyses of subtler points more clear.

Appendix 4. What follows is an attempt at a prose translation

Whatever or whomever America produces or manufactures purely from itself, such as mountain folk from Kentucky or people or products from the populous, diverse part of Northern New Jersey, go crazy. America harbors such people in its faraway, isolate lakes and valleys, places where deaf-mutes, thieves, and people with old world names and identities can live in peace. In such an atavistic setting, promiscuity abounds—between, for example, devil-may-care men who work on railroads, and young peasant women, both working in filth six days a week. They go out Saturday night and wear clothes with no peasant traditions to give their outfits any character, no direct cultural referent. Instead, they wear perhaps the same thing they always wear: sheer rags. The women in particular do their best, flutter their eyelashes and flaunt their bodies. They surrender themselves uncomfortably, either to the outdoors, or to men, among wild, poisonous bushes, without any expression of emotion besides an inarticulate, numbed terror.

Marriage, however, could save these people. Perhaps they could be part-Indian and sent off to a reservation. Perhaps a poor woman with so desolate a situation, from such murder-ridden settings, could be rescued, made a wardship of the state, an orphan, or sent to help out a doctor’s family in an equally desperate but nonetheless rigid household in the suburbs. With great ineloquence, she will proclaim a raw truth about us all. Her body is voluptuous, water-like. She wears cheap jewelry. She will be gawked at by rich men who know no better, as if the earth under our feet were shit from the sky, as if we, too, did not know better, as if we were all prisoners, destined to hunger until we eat filth. This proves that our imaginations strain for anything idyllic, as if everything passing our way were deer going by fields of goldenrod. Somehow that straining destroys us. It is only in isolated moments of understanding where we can draw any conclusions, with no one to concur, witness, and learn, no one to drive us to where we can pass the news.

Appendix 5. Analysis of the analysis’ analysis

What remains throughout is my assertion of the poem’s “clinical” tone and “authoritative” language. The poem, by any measure, is an argument, and one that I think attempts to give the impression of presenting both sides of a story. A paraphrase has to be kept in mind while making a line-by-line analysis. What I had to “witness and adjust” to throughout, however, is that the poem is not all-encompassing ethnography. Indeed, if this poem is a version of pastoral, for instance, one of my first groping readings of the poem, it is between low- and middle-class travails. All of these presuppositions influenced the meaning of the ambiguities, and it is hard to keep them at bay.

The sense and intent of the poem shifts, and by the end the argument concludes that such a thesis cannot be proved without metaphor, without subjectivity. The pursuit in finding where that shift happens, but sound- and meaning-wise is, in my opinion, is a worthy, even crucial, endeavor.

Works Cited and Consulted

Dijkstra, Bram. The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Ehrlich, Eugene, editor. Oxford American Dictionary. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1947.

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