Modern American Poetry

(^98) Thomas R. Whitaker
flowering, of love) manifests itself whenever an ending is genuinely (“neither
hanging / nor pushing”) enacted.
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space. (CEP,249f)
Closer to synthetic Cubism, as in the Gris construction entitled “The
Open Window”—“a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of
sea and mountains” (S&A,34)—is “At the Faucet of June.” It has been
suggested that here the “writing problem is considered from another angle:
How to reconcile the poetic and the anti-poetic?”^4 But “consideration,” in
the usual sense, is foreign to this poem’s non-discursive mode; and “poetic”
and “anti-poetic” are categories (suggested by Wallace Stevens) that
Williams’ work generally repudiates. However, this construction does draw
its parts from a world that has brutalized itself by such categories.
The artist as a man is in that world, and his words are “a dance over the
body of his condition accurately accompanying it” (S&A,91). As dance, it
communicates release from the fixities in that condition. The first three
stanzas catch up increasingly disparate matters, each line requiring a yet
more agile imaginative leap, before the contemporary rape of Persephone by
that gloomy Dis, “J.P.M.,” is ever in question. The “Gordian knot” of the
relation between the classical and an era of finance capitalism is therefore
dissolved before it is named as matter for the dance. Though a Morgan
might cut that knot with a purchase of “a Veronese or / perhaps a Rubens,”
this poem knows with Gris that the “only way to resemble the classics is to
have no part in what we do come of them but to have it our own” (SE,132).
The poem dances past the June sunlight, the rape and maiming of song by
the market mentality, into a destructive autumn in which sudden emergence
of refreshing detail is still possible:
wind, earthquakes in
Manchuria, a
partridge
from dry leaves. (CEP,251f)
As Williams said of Marianne Moore’s “Marriage,” this poem is “an
anthology of transit,” a “pleasure that can be held firm only by moving
rapidly from one thing to the next” (SE,123).