New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  I find it interesting to sort out, in the Collected Poem: Vol I, 1909-1939, those poems which are indeed snapshots, descriptive vignettes, notations of idiom and emphasis (as are some of the very late short poems also), from those which have unobtrusively the resonance of metaphor and symbol.

  The mystery and richness of further significance which such poems of his possess is akin to what R. H. Blyth delineated for us in his commentaries on Japanese haiku. The allusive nature of the Zen art, possible only in a culture alert to the ubiquity of correspondences and familiar with an elaborate symbology, has of course no exact parallel in twentieth-century America; yet Blyth could have been evoking the art of Williams when he quoted this haiku by Kyoroku,

  even to the saucepan

  where potatoes are boiling—

  a moonlit night

  and commented, “It is only when we realize that the moon is in the saucepan with the potatoes that we know the grandeur of the moon in the highest heaven. It is only when we see a part that we know the whole.”

  Readers who come to Williams’ pre-Patersonian or pre-Desert Music poems with the expectation of simple depictive Imagism or of a classic, ascetically single-visioned objectivity (which was not in fact the stated aim of the Objectivists, incidentally) miss these resonances, that sense of discovering, in a vivid part, the adumbration of an unnamed but intensely intuited whole. They forego the experience of becoming aware, precisely through the physical presentness of what is denoted, of the other presentness—invisible but palpable—of what is connoted. They come to the poems solely for the Things; but inherent in the Things are the Ideas.

  I’d like to present two examples along with a running commentary on what I believe is to be found beneath their surfaces.

  “The Farmer,” the third poem from Spring and All, is not a depiction of a farmer that compares him to an artist, but vice versa. Read thus, as a portrait of the artist, each of its images has a double meaning. The literal is there, vivid in every detail. But climate, landscape, everything takes on, along with (not instead of) its denotative significance, a symbolic one. The poet is a farmer, one who tends the land of language and imagination and its creatures, who makes things grow, poem-things, story-things, not out of nowhere but out of the ground on which he walks. At present the rain is falling, the climate is cold and wet, as was the critical climate of the time for Williams the poet; he is exposed to that wet and cold, and his fields—the fields of his art—are apparently empty. But he’s trudging around in that climate and in the fields of language, calmly, hands in his pockets, intent on imagining the future poems; and the rain prepares the soil and the seeds. “On all sides/the world rolls coldly away”—he’s left quite alone with his imagination. The orchard trees are black with the rain, but it is spring (the preceding prose has announced, “Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here,” and the poem states that it is March). Soon those trees (the deep-rooted anatomy of what grows from his terrain) will be white with blossom: there are implied poems in this superficially unpromising landscape; and the very isolation in which the poet is left by the world gives him “room for thought.” His dirt road (his own road among his fields) is sluiced (and thus deepened) by the rain that will help the seeds to sprout. He’s not a small, lost figure in nature, this artist farmer—he “looms” as he moves along past the scratchy brushwood that, trimmed and dried, will make good tinder. The poet is composing as he goes, just as a farmer, pacing his fields on a Sunday at the end of winter, composes in his mind’s eye a picture of spring growth and summer harvest. He is an antagonist—but to what? To the hostility of the environment, which, however, contains the elements that will nourish his crops. And in what sense? In the sense of the struggle to compose—not to impose order but to compose the passive elements into a harvest, to grow not tares but wheat.

  “A Morning Imagination of Russia” is a poem I’m very fond of and which, besides being full of implication and resonances, has many of the qualities of a short story (indeed, as well as being set in Russia, it has a flavor or tone quite Chekhovian); it is a part of The Descent of Winter. Webster Schott’s selection from Williams’ prose and poetry, Imaginations, restored the full context of that series as well as of Spring and All; and Schott, unlike some of Williams’ critics, doesn’t treat him as wholly lacking in thought. Nevertheless, intent upon an enthusiastic but careless reading of this poem (which sees it as speaking figuratively of Williams’ own situation vis-à-vis American poetry), Schott misses the clear drama of its narrative. He quite unjustifiably claims that it depicts Williams himself on an imaginary visit to Russia after the revolution, whereas (however much he may be a projection of the poet’s sensibility) it seems to me quite clear that the protagonist is not intended as a persona in the sense of a mere mask for the self, but as a more fully projected fictive personage, a member of the intelligentsia who is casting his lot with the masses. The time is very early in the revolution. Nothing has yet settled down. No new repressive bureaucracy has yet replaced the old oppression. The whole atmosphere is like that of a convalescent’s first walk in pale sunshine after a time when bitter storms in the world outside paralleled his inner storm of fever and life-and-death struggle. It begins:

  The earth and the sky were very close

  When the sun rose it rose in his heart

  The dawn is, equally, an actual one and the dawn of an era. And he feels one with it.

  It bathed the red cold world of

  the dawn so that the chill was his own

  The red is the red of sunrise and of revolution.

  The mists were sleep and sleep began

  to fade from his eyes ….

  The mists are both morning mists and the mists of the past, of prerevolutionary sleep. His consciousness is changing.

  …. below him in the

  garden a few flowers were lying forward

  on the intense green grass where

  in the opalescent shadows oak leaves

  were pressed hard down upon it in patches

  by the night rain ….

  The beauty of flowers and grass, opalescent shadows, patches of rain-soaked dead oak leaves, is vividly evoked. It can all be read with validity as pure, precise description. But it too has a doubleness; the whole scene has been through a night of storm, the flowers are bowed forward by it, the grass is more vividly green than it would have been without it, but parts of the grass are hidden and half-smothered by the fallen brown leaves. All this is the counterpart of his own experience and of events in the historical moment. The flowers and common grass of his own life, after the storm, are more vivid and yet almost broken—and some of his life is gone, fallen like the leaves, gone with the lives and the ways of living fallen in war and revolution.

  …. There were no cities

  between him and his desires

  his hatreds and his loves were without walls

  without rooms, without elevators

  without files, delays of veiled murderers

  muffled thieves, the tailings of

  tedious, dead pavements, the walls

  against desire save only for him who can pay

  high, there were no cities—he was

  without money—

  Cities had faded richly

  into foreign countries, stolen from Russia—

  the richness of her cities—

  Here, deep in rural Russia, deep into the attempt to construct a new society, he is not impeded by the complexities of urban, Westernized Russia. His nature, with its desires, hatreds, loves, is out in the open; and the “city” here clearly stands for more than an architectural and demographic agglomeration, but for the money values of capitalism. He has no money—but here and now he does not need it. All the desirable content of Russia’s cities has been stolen away, gone West with the émigrés.

  Scattered wealth was close to his heart

  he felt it uncertainly beating at

  that moment in his wrist
s, scattered

  wealth—but there was not much at hand

  The “scattered wealth” he feels (scattered like money and jewels dropped by fleeing thieves) is his own and Russia’s—it has not been, and cannot be, wholly robbed, absconded with. He feels that, feels it close. But also he feels a tickling wave of nostalgia:

  Cities are full of light, fine clothes

  delicacies for the table, variety,

  novelty—fashion: all spent for this.

  Never to be like that again:

  the frame that was. It tickled his

  imagination. But it passed in a rising calm.

  He feels a nostalgia for all which (for now, anyway, and perhaps forever) must be given up for the sake of the new thing yet to be defined. The old context, the frame, gone. But now “this”: the “few flowers,” the vividness he will know.

  That wave of nostalgia passes in a rising calm—not the sinking calm of resignation, but a lift of the spirits.

  Tan dar a dei! Tan dar a dei!

  He was singing. Two miserable peasants

  very lazy and foolish

  seemed to have walked out from his own

  feet and were walking away with wooden rakes

  under the six nearly bare poplars, up the hill

  There go my feet.

  Singing with lifted spirits (singing, one notices—and there is an irony in this—that medieval refrain we associate with spring, love and courtesy, ancient forests, knights errant, and troubadours), he feels as much one with the peasants he watches from his window as he had with the chill red dawn. He sees them as lazy and foolish, as well as miserable, just as he might have done from the viewpoint of prerevolutionary class privilege: he does not idealize them; but the difference is that now he identifies with them, lazy and foolish as they are, and with their task—to rake away rubbish, perhaps dead leaves—to which they must go uphill. “There go my feet.”

  He stood still in the window forgetting

  to shave—

  The very old past was refound

  redirected. It had wandered into himself

  The world was himself, these were

  his own eyes that were seeing, his own mind

  that was straining to comprehend, his own

  hands that would be touching other hands

  They were his own!

  His own, feeble, uncertain …

  In this new world—around him and within him—he finds ancient roots which has been razed but, not the immediate past which has been razed but the very old past,” taking new directions. Identified with what is happening historically, he feels himself a microcosm; the proposition invites reversal—it is not only that he is intimately and intensely involved but that, just as his mind strains to comprehend, so the mind of the peasants, the mind of all Russia collectively, strains to see, to comprehend. His hands, though, reaching out to touch others, are feeble and uncertain; and so are the hands of the multitude.

  … He would go

  out to pick herbs, the graduate of

  the old university. He would go out

  and ask that old woman, in the little

  village by the lake, to show him wild

  ginger. He himself would not know the plant.

  He will go humbly, as pupil of the old peasant, the ancient root wisdom, not as teacher of others.

  A horse was stepping up the dirt rood

  under his window

  —a live thing moving on unpaved earth: not merely a descriptive detail but a metaphor.

  He decided not to shave. Like those two [the two peasants]

  that he knew now, as he had never

  known them formerly. A city, fashion

  had been between—

  Nothing between now.

  He would go to the soviet unshaven. This

  was the day—and listen. Listen. That

  was all he did, listen to them, weigh

  for them. He was turning into

  a pair of scales, the scales in the

  zodiac.

  This is evidently the day of the regular meeting of the local soviet, which he is attending not for the first time (as one can gather from the syntax), and it is also the day of a new access of consciousness and resolve, a first day in some sense. He puts his university education at the service of the community. Perhaps he weighs physical supplies—grain, fertilizer, medicines—bringing particular professional skills into play: that’s not specified. But there’s more to weighing than that. He not only feels, with a mixture of humility and amusement, that he becomes his function, becomes a pair of scales, but that they are the zodiacal scales, charged with moral, mythical, and psychological symbolism.

  But closer, he was himself

  the scales …

  That is, not only did his work of weighing transform him into a junction, but he was anyway, intrinsically, an evaluator, he realizes.

  … The local soviet. They could

  weigh …

  In his new sense of identification with his fellows, others too become intrinsically, as humans, evaluators.

  … If it was not too late.

  That is, if too much damage had not already been done; too much for the revolution to have a future; too much for that human ability to measure for themselves, to evaluate justly, to manifest itself among the many.

  … He felt

  uncertain many days. But all were uncertain

  together and he must weigh for them out

  of himself.

  His “weighing” is a service he performs as an intellectual, contributing his ability to listen closely, which has been trained by education. But his judgments must be made out of a commitment, a center in himself, and not merely abstractly, perfunctorily. It is “out of himself,” his very substance, that he must act.

  He took a small pair of scissors

  from the shelf and clipped his nails

  carefully. He himself served the lire.

  He reasserts his education, maintains his standards of hygiene and decent appearance. But to attend to the fire in his hearth himself—this is new for him. To use his hands, with their clean, clipped nails. And that fire: it is literal, and it is the fire of life, hope, revolution. Now he soliloquizes:

  We have cut out the cancer but

  who knows? perhaps the patient will die.

  He reiterates his own realistic uncertainty. Then he proceeds to define the “patient,” which is not solely Russia, a country in the throes of total reorganization:

  The patient is anybody, anything

  worthless that I desire, my hands

  to have it—…

  Lines which I would gloss thus: anybody, anything albeit considered “worthless” that I desire, my hands desiring to have it: that is to say, the “patient” is the sum of things that, though the world think them tawdry, assigning them no value, Williams consistently sees as having the glitter of life: cats’ eyes in the dark: “Beautiful Thing,” “Melon flowers that open/about the edge of refuse”; “the small/yellow cinquefoil in the /parched places.” Or those starlings in the wind’s teeth. And, too, the “patient” whose survival is in question is desire itself, the desire to touch that aliveness with bare hands,

  … —instead of the feeling

  that there is a piece of glazed paper

  between me and the paper—invisible

  but tough running through the legal

  processes of possession—

  That glazed top sheet, a transparent obstacle to touch, covers the surface even of the documents that proclaim possession of what is desired, and thus cancels out the experience of possession.

  —a city, that

  we could possess—

  That is, my bands desire to hsave a city that we could possess. (The syntax is clearer here if instead of dashes before the word “instead” and after the word “possession” we enclose those lines in parentheses.) A city, then—unlike the cities that have “faded richly/into foreign countries” and were only t
o be enjoyed by those who “can pay high”—that would embody an accessible life.

  It’s an art, it’s in

  the French school.

  What we lacked was

  everything. It is the middle of

  everything. Not to have.

  Here both “it’s” refer back to the “patient” in the sense of that quality of immediacy which, in the prose passage immediately preceding “A Morning Imagination of Russia” in the Descent of Winter sequence and dated only one day before it, Williams had said was the very goal of poetry: “poetry should strive for nothing else, this vividness alone, per se, for itself,” and further, “The vividness which is poetry.” So, “It’s in art, in the French school”—here he draws on his own educated knowledge and experience, on all that make him different from those two “miserable, lazy, and foolish” peasants—and also “It is the middle of everything”—it is not only in art but in all kinds of things, common experience, and here he reasserts his sense of brotherhood. But “What we lacked was everything … Not to have” was what, till now, we experienced. I am reminded here of Wallace Stevens’ lines, “That’s what misery is,/Nothing to have at heart.” Both the intellectual (because of his sense of that invisible wall of glazed paper between him and life), and oppressed and ignorant people have hitherto been cut off from the “everything” in the middle of which are found the sparks of vivid beauty; they have experienced only not booing, absence.

  We have little now but

  we have that

  [The “it,” the sparks, the poetry.]

  We are convalescents. Very