Monday, October 15, 2012

Free Verse: Flat and Hard upon the Page

(Comparing Two Versions of a William Carlos Williams poem)

The second version of William Carlos Williams’s poem “Young Woman at a Window” is an excellent example of imagism, employing many of the movement’s techniques and goals. The first version of the same poem fails to meet the requirements of the Imagist Manifesto and explores other poetic techniques instead.

Although both versions of the poem employ free verse, the cadence in the second version disrupts conventional speech more than it does in the first. For example, Williams uses line breaks to emphasize his breaking up of prepositional phrases. In both versions, he breaks after the preposition “on”: “tears on” and “her cheek on.” In the second, he brings this new speech further even more by beginning with a similar break: “she sits with.” At the end, the poet allows “in her lap” and “to the glass” to be presented together, nevertheless continuing his emphasis on the importance of prepositional phrases.

In the second version of the poem, Williams relies exclusively on a static visual image to convey his meaning. In the first poem, the boy acts and moves, rubbing his nose. But in the second, the image is utterly still and unmoving. Here the boy’s nose is pressed against the window, not dynamic and not in flux. The intense use of the prepositions of placement (such as "on" and "to" and "in") further emphasizes the staticness of the description by pointing out that everything is already placed in physical space. Similarly, the first poem assigns the active very “robs” to the subject of the boy, while in the second version the verb assigned to him is both passive and subsumed in an adjectival clause.

The static image the second version of the poem presents uses language and imagery that is never indefinite. While the interpretation of the poem as a whole might be open, the way the words describe the image itself is quite specific and closed. The image can easily be imagined as a painting hanging in a museum. The first version, on the other hand, states that the boy “who robs her knows nothing of his theft,” a claim that does not refer to a specific fact or image but instead to an abstraction. This phrase is highly open, and therefore the poem contradicts the goals of the Manifesto. Interestingly, at least in my view, the closed, definite image of the second version creates a poem with a more open meaning.

Finally, while both poems are condensed and concentrated, the second version is tighter than the first. Williams cuts his word count from twenty-nine words to twenty-three. He cuts the number of stanzas from six to five. In addition, in the second version but not in the first, no word is more than one syllable.

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