"POETRY BEYOND POETRY"

Of William Carlos William's poem "Asphodel, that greeny flower," Robert Lowell claimed it as a piece of art that had reached and sought a "poetry beyond poetry."

I have never read a poem that affected me as deeply as this poem. I am thinking of working my ECE around this poem and the Wendell Berry ideas about the fidelity and marriage of language to the poet. If anyone has a book that may be worth taking a look at, I'd be appreciate for some help.

Here is an essay I wrote last semester that is the starting point of my ECE.

THE SUNLIGHT OF ASPHODEL, THAT GREENY FLOWER

In “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams sheds poetic sunlight on a new American poetic style characterized by long passages of stream-of-consciousness wandering that ultimately lead to simple, poignant statements of love. At the core, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” is a love poem. What surrounds the poem is the context of the poet’s life—a subplot that pushes the poem beyond what is normally sought in a poetic experience. Williams defies almost every classic love poem tenet: he is prideful, unfocused with his images, and complicated beyond the borders of a neat expression of love. What follows is a poem based from the poet’s life, unashamed and perhaps desperate in its attempt to win back the favor of “Floss”, the wife Williams has cheated on many times with patients during his tenure as a doctor in New Jersey. The sunlight of the poem, which accelerates its abstract forms of affective disturbance, is that Williams does not cower behind a metaphor but rather decides to face his reader’s judgment, thereby humbling his greatest source of pride: the spotlessness of the artist.
Written in three books, there is a loose thematic overview that can be found. In book one, Williams establishes his soul’s awareness of its proximity to death. Williams skirts around scattered images after starting the poem with “I come, my sweet, / to sing to you.” (9) Within this first section, Williams names his conflict or opposition—time. In an abstract sense, remembering that this is a love poem, Williams recasts the roles of the chivalrous hero or knight, the beautiful damsel, and the dragon. In this new system, Williams’ speaker is not necessarily worthy of the damsel, whom is perceived to be grieved by the actions of the speaker. That time functions as a dragon is a clean and easy read. Williams gives us this parallel when he writes, “Listen, while I talk on / against time.”(10) After some ‘flowery’ language of memories as a boy and a rush of associated memories, Williams begins his poem thirty-five lines in. He writes, “There is something / something urgent / I have to say to you / and you alone.”(10) Obviously, this statement is not literally meant. It is written down and thus, created in some capacity to assuage the grief of the woman Williams loves while doing what the poet loves: writing poetry.
Williams does not overstate his love. He presents it as it is: a ruin of fault. Thus, stating, “I cannot say / that I have gone to hell / for your love / but often / found myself there / in your pursuit,” reads as an emotional tidal wave. The reader responds to fault, to having failed another person since every reader is human and has likely caused the dark side of heart ache.
Also in book one, Williams constructs a double-fisted set of statements. As Herbert Leibowitz writes in his introduction, “William mixes painful contrition and willed, confessional logic; he is unrepentant one moment, humble the next.” (6) To illustrate this, the reader may examine what the poet does with the myth of Helen. Essentially, Williams defends the love story of the Trojan War, citing that had there not been war and death, “there would have been / no poem.”(15) Furthering along this thought, Williams writes, “All women are not Helen, / I know that, / but have Helen in their hearts.”(15) Again, Williams appears awkward in his attempts to construe an acceptable logic, something to supply his own mind peace. Later in book one, Williams goes so far as to say that he cheated on his wife to test their “love.” He writes, “I risked what I had to do, / therefore to prove / that we love each other.” (18) This reads as a pathetic sort of argument, and within that conceit does the reader begin to find some hope or desire that the speaker will be redeemed or taken back.
Book two is a series of stories—mostly meaningless except in their function—to delay. Here, Williams seems to take his time mustering up the gumption to admit his fault flat out. The reader would like to hear this, thereby fulfilling his or her own process of involvement within the poem. We can’t, in good conscience, root for a man who has cheated on his wife if he is going to try and build rhetorical devices or logics to wiggle out of responsibility. Williams knows that his reader is waiting, everyone is waiting, even “Floss” is waiting for him to do something simple: say “I’m sorry.” This is what the normal love poet would do. Williams, however, tries to construct himself as an equal.
In book three, Williams strings together a series of lines that stay focused on “Floss” and do not deviate into generalities of other “men” and other love stories or just random happenings. Perhaps, the richest lines of the poem, he writes:

Having your love
I was rich.
Thinking to have lost it
I am tortured
and cannot rest.
I do not come to you
abjectly
with confessions of my faults,
I have confessed,
all of them.
In the name of love
I come proudly
as to an equal
to be forgiven. (28)

Later in part three, Williams offers some semblance of the flat apology. He writes, “I spoke hurriedly / in the spell / of some wry impulse / when I boasted / that there was / any pride left in me. / Do not believe it.” (34) This line, coming so late in the poem, is of great relief and order to the reader. It allays our remaining hesitations to take up the speaker and champion his cause.
It is significant how Williams ends the poem in book three. The lines that precede the grandest of promises—“you will be my queen, / my queen of love / forever more”—are the lines of an artist, not the man. Williams writes:

Don’t think
that because I say this
in a poem
it can be treated lightly
or that the facts will not uphold it.
Are facts not flowers
and flowers facts
or poems flowers
or all works of the imagination,
interchangeable? (37)

These lines suggest the greatest of hidden statements. That the speaker, projected to be Williams himself, does not trust himself as a man to say things and make them right. He seeks to improve himself, to alter his fallen ‘knighthood’ by reclaiming his sword, a pen, and attempting to tie a knot off at his confession. This sought ascension also suggests that Williams comes to his wife in what he perceives to be the best form possible, the most gentlemanly. Spotless no longer, the artist and the man have blended in an indefinable way, such that “Floss” has no choice but to accept both.
While “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” is a love poem, it is untraditional in almost every mannerism that characterizes what the speaker of love poems do. Williams, the same poet who preached that there are “no ideas but in things” and wrote poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is just to say” in earlier work is now overcome by emotion and submits to his stream of thoughts, allowing the poem itself to become the thing, the flower, the choice of the reader to see its objectiveness within feeling.

























Work Cited


Williams, William Carlos. Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems. New York: New Directions, 1994.