Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 99

Less difficult poems are “The Eyeglasses” and “The Right of Way,”
where imaginative disjunction is subdued by the ordinary mode of prose
discourse. In “The Eyeglasses” the potential relatedness in the field of
constructive vision—the “swiftness that passes without repugnance from
thing to thing” (SE,124)—is itself the theme. “It takes writing such as
unrelated passing on the street,” Williams said later, when exploring this
vision in January: A Novelette,“to rescue us for a design that alone affords
conversation” (Nov,28). In “The Right of Way” he has lightly combined a
realistic narrative frame of “passing on the street” with the dynamics of rapid
transit. The opening lines may seem at first to be banal:

In passing with my mind

on nothing in the world

but the right of way

I enjoy on the road by

virtue of the law—

I saw

—but, after tracing the interrelated and interrupted figures in the snapshots
that follow, we realize that we have already been given quite accurately the
poem’s esthetic: the law of its vision. It relates a transit unblurred by concern
for before and after; the eye is fixed concretely on emptiness. A later passage
gives the self-sustaining dynamism of that essentially non-verbal vision:

The supreme importance

of this nameless spectacle

sped me by them

without a word—(CEP,258f)

In its humorous realism this poem is close to Pieter Brueghel, whose
paintings Williams would later use as bases for just such constructions, or to
a photographer (say, Jacques Henri Lartigue) who may capture the transient
relationships of “unrelated” life in flux. But the weakness of the poem results
from its very realism: focusing with self-indulgence upon the speaker as
possessor of this vision, it subtly negates nowthe past experience which he
can merely relate.
Closer to the immediate is “The Red Wheelbarrow”—a poem that