As noted last June in my first Poetic License column (david-grahams-poetic-license-2016-june-no-1.html), I can get cranky when informed that poetry should do this or that, or that all good poems are X, Y, or Z.  Poetry, like music, comes in many styles, playable on innumerable instruments.  Milton’s deep organ tones don’t much resemble the quietly plucked strings of a Basho.  Whitman and Dickinson are both very great poets, but remain as distinct as a tortoise and a giraffe.  Still, we poets are fairly ornery beasts, and apparently can’t help ourselves.  In our off-duty hours, we love to pronounce, define, prohibit, prescribe, and otherwise meditate on our chosen art.  Many of us are quick to join any argument about poetry’s origins, purpose, or best qualities.  Thus I’ve been struck but not surprised to see that not all of my own speculations in these columns have garnered universal agreement.  Imagine that!  So please take what follows not as a prescription but a pondering of one kind of poem that engages one kind of poet.  At least on alternate Tuesdays . . . .

I’m thinking of a sort of lyric that seldom gets called a masterpiece or attracts much classroom attention—in large part because the language is so straightforward.   I’ll call it, after a great phrase by Robert Coles, the poetry of The Great Unmentionables.  Coles used the phrase in describing William Carlos Williams’s willingness to address  things that seldom get into poems, because we don’t like to think about them, or are embarrassed to be caught thinking about them.

Such a poem challenges not because it employs abstruse diction, makes complex allusions, or requires special knowledge to decipher, but because it presents uncomfortable truth.  The language may be clear as fresh well water, but the emotions called into play can be dark, elusive, and subtle.  The poem speaks to the myriad mysteries of everyday life.  Simple to read, but not necessarily easy to absorb or accept.  Poems of this kind get called "deceptively simple," though I might prefer a phrase like "profoundly simple" instead.  And a master of this sort of work is, in fact, the poet that Coles was discussing, William Carlos Williams.  To illustrate the concept, here is one of my own favorites, first published in 1920:


     Waiting


     When I am alone I am happy.
     The air is cool.  The sky is
     flecked and splashed and wound
     with color.  The crimson phalloi
     of the sassafras leaves
     hang crowded before me
     in shoals on the heavy branches.
     When I reach my doorstep
     I am greeted by
     the happy shrieks of my children
     and my heart sinks.
     I am crushed.
 
     Are not my children as dear to me
     as falling leaves or
     must one become stupid
     to grow older?
     It seems much as if Sorrow
     had tripped up my heels.
     Let us see, let us see!
     What did I plan to say to her
     when it should happen to me
     as it has happened now?
 

I love this poem especially for its richly layered textures of feeling, beginning with the title, which immediately raises the question:  waiting for what?  The reader wonders, but the poem is not going to say just yet.  The body of the poem commences with a bald, nearly childlike statement of self-absorption, followed by some scene-setting:
 

     When I am alone I am happy.
     The air is cool.  The sky is
     flecked and splashed and wound
     with color.
 

Who is this speaker?  Perhaps a young lover, dazzled and besotted by the lushness of the natural world?  He is apparently out walking, enjoying the colors and sensations of the weather, the trees, the sky.  Everything is presented simply, clearly.  But “when I am alone I am happy” strikes an odd note, doesn't it?  It is unusual to see such a stark admission of self-centeredness, however common a feeling it undoubtedly is.  The first stanza then supplies further descriptive detail, placing us in a landscape of richly sensuous, clearly erotic natural imagery:
 

     The crimson phalloi
     of the sassafras leaves
     hang crowded before me
     in shoals on the heavy branches.
 

The stanza ends with another surprising admission, which also reveals that the speaker is not some star-crossed lover or lyric knight on a quest, but simply a father heading home, probably after his day’s work is done:
 

     When I reach my doorstep
     I am greeted by
     the happy shrieks of my children
     and my heart sinks.
     I am crushed.
 

Crushed?  That's hardly what I expect a father to say, however much he might feel weary of the demands of fatherhood.  And it's not typically what I’m used to seeing a poet write, either.  So many of us are concerned with convincing readers of our special sensitivity and goodness.  Williams's speaker, faced with the boisterous clamor of his children, who are delighted to see that Dad's home, finds his mood darken.  Not something we’re supposed to admit to--though I doubt there is any parent in the universe who hasn’t sometimes felt this way.  He’s been thoroughly enjoying his solitude, the sensuous landscape he walks through going home, and yet when confronted by his children, he is “crushed,” which certainly goes beyond merely feeling weary, bored, or even exasperated.
 
Yet he is going home, the good father facing his responsibilities.  And here it gets even stranger.  Turns out he has been planning what he might say to “her” (his wife, presumably) about this odd mood he's now in: 
 

     What did I plan to say to her
     when it should happen to me
     as it has happened now?
 

There’s quiet comedy in this.  This father has somehow planned for this disappointment, has foreseen his moment of crisis and prepared some sort of speech of announcement to his wife.  It seems what he’s been waiting for is precisely this moment of disillusionment, and perhaps he’s been waiting a long time.  Maybe he has long intended to run off and drive his sports car across the country, or some such midlife escapism.  The only problem is, he seems to have forgotten what it was he was going to say, and do.  He feels the impulse to flee his fatherly duties, but can’t quite remember where or why. 
 
This is the true “great unmentionable” here.  The poem dramatizes the husband’s desire to evade his responsibilities, but also leaves us with the clear implication that he’s not going anywhere.   In fact, maybe he doesn’t really want to go anywhere else, even if he's feeling crushed by domesticity.  So he’s stuck in a common sort of limbo, neither the romantic rebellious youth, nor completely the earnest, docile householder.  He’s just a mass of anxieties and unacted impulse.  And that is Sorrow indeed. 
 
But it’s also a little funny, isn’t it?  When the speaker asks himself, "must one become stupid / to grow older?" he is surely aware of the absurdity of his own situation.  He even seems a bit amused by his own dithering.  I called this poem highly textured because of this combination of emotions.  W. H. Auden once defined poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and this poem fits that definition to a T. 
 
I haven’t done justice to the poem's tone, which I hear as lightly self-mocking throughout even as it deals with absolutely real emotional issues.  In any case, I hear no arrogance or preening here, and am grateful:  so many poets want to be admired for their domestic despair and their little back yard epiphanies.  Williams is something else entirely.  He impresses me not with admirable sentiments but with something fairly rare:  a fully honest voice.      

​©2017 David Graham