BrendaChristeleit

Brenda Christeleit
Professor D. Jerz
EL267 – Paper #1 (Expansion of Exercise 1-2a)
14 March 2006
Pastoral by William Carlos Williams – An Early Insight into Later Poems

Pastoral by William Carlos Williams’ (Conarroe 151) is an early example of his use of everyday language, renunciation of symbolism, attention to the visual form and shifting of perspective. Although scholars have paid more attention to his poem by the same title that begins “The little sparrows/hop ingenuously…” (Conarroe 152), the subject Pastoral is worth exploration as a forerunner of Williams’ mature style.

Williams’ style evolved rapidly from awkward syntax to shorter everyday phrases with precise page placement. 1909’s Poems has “…sentences…so long you lose track of them” with “convoluted and inverted clauses and subordinate clauses” (Perloff, Voices & Visions). Although Pastoral was written very soon after Poems was published, it demonstrates a shift to ordinary speech which occurred for at least three reasons: 1)Williams adopted prevalent ideas from visual art, 2) he closely observed his surroundings, and 3)his habit of scribbling notes on his small physician prescription pads led to more concise and authentic language. Pastoral uses unaffected “non-poetic” language in its opening line, “When I was younger/It was plain to me/I must make something of myself” (1-3). This matter-of-fact statement could be spoken in everyday conversation, and its ordinariness has no need of paraphrase.
Williams’ method of writing the early poetry, including Pastoral, is “…to start with an image, then either moralize it, or in some way assert that it is important.” (Townley 80). The speaker admires the decrepit shanties “of the very poor” (7), but never indicates disdain or pity. Contrarily, he demonstrates a connection between himself, his upbringing, his current life and his countrymen. The idea that the subject matter of Pastoral merits a poem stems from the as yet embryonic idea that “…there is no need to need to go anywhere or do anything to possess the plenitude of existence (Miller 4)”, and it this reason that Williams never became an ex-patriot as did contemporaries Hemingway and Eliot. His subject is strengthened by the use of indigenous speech patterns and language.

Pastoral also hints at the later works by its rejection of symbolism. Williams’ seeks to express the contact between words, imagination and the object (Imaginations 59). Pastoral’s images include “Roof out of line with sides/The yards cluttered/With old chicken wire, ashes,/Furniture gone wrong;” (8-11) do not symbolize anything but themselves. Even though Williams doesn’t require the resolution of symbols, there remains a value judgment which disappears in later works like Breakfast (Conarroe 164).
Williams’ was professionally trained to observe “absolutely commonplace details” (Kenner, Voices & Visions). Such training led to his belief that “poems are not made of beautiful thoughts, they are made of words” (Williams, Voices & Visions). He ironically titles the subject work “Pastoral”, not because it is an ode to a bucolic setting, but because it expresses Rutherford, N.J. - his ideal. He asserts his place in history by taking a European ideal of paradise and overlaying it on the poor America. As Miller writes in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays:
His work registers a change in sensibility [and his…] presuppositions about poetry and human existence are…a unique version of a new tradition. What they are and the way they are implicit in each of his poems can only be discovered by that immersion in his writing which must precede interpretation of any part of it. The difficulties of such interpretation may be suggested by consideration of the ways Williams’ work fails to provide the reader habituated to romantic or symbolist poetry with the qualities he expects.” (1-2).

This “change in sensibility” is most apparent in Pastoral’s lack of symbolism. Miller continues “For Williams, the uniqueness of each thing is more important than any horizontal resonances it may have with other things” (4). Cappucci names Pastoral as an example of Williams’ belief in “the purpose and power of poetry” (375). He documents Williams’ “unique aesthetic pleasure” (379) in finding poetry amid his surroundings, which includes the use of “…short unrhymed lines and colloquial phrases like ‘furniture gone wrong’ to portray the distinct voice of the locale.”(379). Williams states in Collected Poems, “Unconsciously, I was playing with the form of the line, and getting into the American idiom”(481). However unconscious it may be in Pastoral, this attempt to elevate the American language to poetry without use of symbolism or romanticism reaches its apex in later works.
Williams’ later attention to the visual form of a poem is also foretold in the physical placement of the poem’s most robust lines, “No one/Will believe this/Of vast import to the nation.” The only such alignment in the entire work, Williams significantly indents the line “No one” which introduces the remaining concluding phrases. This attention to spacing is a direct influence from the avant-garde visual arts scene, as well as a precursor to his later idea that poets use words like painters uses paint (Perloff, Voices & Visions). Referring to an ensuing work entitled, The Red Wheelbarrow, Morris writes, “As well as creating an image, the poem’s own structure is also part of its meaning […] Each individual verse actually makes a shape like a wheelbarrow…” (Morris 1155). The subject matter, the poet’s relationship to the subject, and the visual form of the poem are all themes through Williams’ later work, and are all found in the infrequently studied Pastoral.

The final evocation of what was to come provided by Pastoral is its shifts in perspective. The first change is implied in the aging of the author and the second comes with the jolting final phrase. Like The Red Wheelbarrow, perspective is a theme. Blythe and Sweet write that “When read carefully, in fact, the poem [The Red Wheelbarrow] is not only a statement about the importance of perspective (‘so much depends’) but an exercise that forces readers to experience actual changes in perspective” (39). They liken the shifts to a movie director’s shot sequence of close-up, extreme close-up, then wide-angle as the poem progresses (40). In Pastoral, the camera shots would proceed from a close up on the speaker, then a wide-angle on the house, then an extreme close-up on the speaker again for the final lines. These shifts in perspective do not allow the reader to remain comfortable while reading the poems.
If the reader is attentive, they will discover that even in the early and little-known poem Pastoral, Williams Carlos Williams was laying the foundation for future work. Some themes included are the use of ordinary language and rejection of symbolism, the visual impact of a poem, and engaging the reader on different levels through shifts in perspective. Williams’ immersed himself in his surroundings, and sought to express the contact between his imagination, the object and words. Pastoral is a surprising example of the different ways that Williams’ work evolved into his later highly individual, modern and influential poems.

REFERENCES

Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. "Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow'." ANQ 14.1 (2001): 39-40.
Cappucci, Paul R. "'And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing': William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and the News of the Day in Verse." Papers on Language and Literature 39.4 (2003): 375-89.
Conarroe, Joel, ed. Six American Poets. New York: Random House, 1991.
Cosgrove, Peter. "Hopkins's ‘The Windhover’: Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Poetics Today 25.3 (2004): 437-64.
Garcia, José Maria Rodriguez. "War and Degradation in Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams." Orbis Litterarum 58.2 (2003): 79-100.
Mikkelsen, Ann. "The Truth about Us": Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Paterson." American Literature 75.3 (2003): 601-26.
Miller, J. Hillis, ed. William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
Rogers, Richard P. (Director) & Jill Janows (Producer). Voices & Visions: William Carlos
Williams (Video). New York: The New York Center for Visual History, Inc., 1988.
Scott, Webster, ed. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1971.
Townley, Rod. The Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Williams, William Carlos. In: ML Rosenthal, ed. The William Carlos Williams Reader. New York: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966.
Williams, William Carlos. Poems. Intro., Virginia M. Wright-Peterson. 2nd. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002.