Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The collection, “Journey To Love,” dedicated to William Carlos Williams’s wife, Flossie, was written after he suffered debilitating effects of serious health issues. As the now elderly, disabled writer, Williams creates these sixteen poems, characterized by a shifting point of view, and his quizzically yet honest voice about the sacredness in details of everyday life. The older Williams affirms truth in his recall of images that in their “thisness” memory keeps alive. From the initial image of the lone Negro woman clasping her newspaper- wrapped bouquet of marigolds “as a torch,” Williams imagines her walking through the early morning streets, an alternative image of Lady Liberty. She represents otherness, difference, not just a woman walking the streets alone, but rather, a streetwalker. This image reflects a bit of the times, an image of survival, an image of one breaking out of the norms of social acceptability; the simple marigolds she holds symbolize sexuality. The older Williams discovers truth in such an image as he reminisces upon images in his memories. These peak memories paradoxically maintain a vitality of their own, for as he writes, “Memory/ is liver than sight.” Each of these sixteen poems reflects Williams’ interiority as husband, son, and poet, “This was I,/a sparrow./I did my best;/farewell.” The sacredness in the ordinary, in the “thisness” of those images of life that he witnessed, in the “thisness” of his own life is revealed as Williams identifies with that lone sparrow, both an ordinary or common bird now separated from the community of other sparrows, yet one that in Christian beliefs symbolizes the hope for God’s care, concern, and perhaps, forgiveness. Several intense poems integrate the personal pronoun, “I” and the collective “we” showing his double consciousness about his body, soul, and mind—his disabilities, his limitations as a poet, his life as a husband, his life as the “pink locust.” In yet another poem, the persona of a female reflects on male female relationships and hopes that in a furious storm she and her husband can stick it out together, as “so solidly had our house been built.” She wishes this image to “the final fury,” or as the reader might understand the wish, “till death do us part.” He portrays the wife as the image of fidelity. Through this collection of poems, Williams reveals his beliefs that in earlier poems affirm life with its beauty in love, loss, and grief, and presence of grace and dignity in ordinary details, and perhaps in broken places. In his role as a physician, witnessing the birth of over 3000 humans, he affirms the beauty of the birthing process —“ They enter the new world naked,/cold, uncertain of all/ save that they enter. All about them/ the cold familiar wind… But now the stark dignity of/entrance ….” Williams asserts, how “they [we]/ grip down and begin to awaken” (Spring and All). …. Through his poetry, Williams affirms this “stark dignity” this beauty of life in the ordinary, often stark details of our being.