Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 95

pink flames in their right hands.

In white from head to foot,

with sidelong, idle look—

in yellow, floating stuff,

black sash and stockings—

touching their avid mouths

with pink sugar on a stick—

like a carnation each holds in her hand—

they mount the lonely street. (CEP,227)

Aside from one overt metaphor (“flames”), another hidden in a simile

(“carnation”), and the final attribution of loneliness to the street itself, the

statements are uncompromisingly literal. But each conveys more than its

literal meaning. We are urged to pay close attention almost at once by the

repeated “at ease” and by the seeming contradiction between the second

sentence and the third. What has happened to that heat? We find it again in

“flames”—by which time the end of schooling, the walking of streets, the

expectation, and the growth have begun to form their significant pattern.

The insubstantiality of the white—its sweeping innocence immediately

modified by “sidelong, idle look”; the frothiness of the yellow—given point,

with a rhythmic shift, by “black sash and stockings”; and, most intensely, the

bare physicality of the next line, with its key word “avid”: these details

complete a situation in which the “pink sugar on a stick” reveals itself as the

substitute satisfaction of a desire that may not have become fully conscious.

The last two lines distance and formalize this hidden seasonal

restlessness, the flower of flesh, and generalize its urban meaning. Yet that

fresh word, “mount,” focuses with immediacy the rising effort under their

“ease”—even as it signals the entry into a new phase of life. Surely it is a

drastic reduction of this poem to find its main notes to be “adolescent

silliness and girlish charm, ... foolish pleasures and their grey setting.”^2 Of

other poets writing in English or American in 1921, only D.H. Lawrence

would have been able to render this scene with comparable realism,

sympathetic detachment, and penetration.

II SPRING ANDALL

The diversity of Williams’ art is further evident in two poems of 1922:
“The Jungle,” with its “Jamesian perception”^3 of non-Jamesian material
(obliquely presented through a negated analogy and a quoted phrase), and
“The Bull,” which symbolically diagnoses a temptation for the Jamesian