Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 109

from

her thoughts (CEP,76f)

Form must constantly be opened, reshaped, transcended—so that the
attention or imagination or love (which are essentially a single creative force)
may be allowed re-entry and dance or song may be quickened. Perhaps the
most remarkable rendering of that process in the first half of Williams’ work
is the concluding poem in this sequence, “The Botticellian Trees”:

The alphabet of

the trees

is fading in the

song of the leaves ...

The single conceit that the poem at first seems to develop with unusual
metaphysical rigor gradually dissolves—in accord with its own meaning.
Moving to its formal close, the poem enacts that opening which transcends
the formal without denying it:

In summer the song

sings itself

above the muffled words— (CEP,80f)

NOTES

1. In addition to the erroneous dating of the “Transitional” poems, other mistakes
   have resulted from reliance upon published volumes or longer sequences. Vivienne Koch,
   for example, judged that the period between Spring and All(1923) and “The Descent of
   Winter” (1928) had been a “stalemate in Williams’ otherwise clear line of progress”
   (William Carlos Williams,p. 60). But both the “stalemate” and the “clear line of progress”
   must be questioned. Poems published in magazines before 1928 but not collected until
   1934 (Collected Poems 1921–1931) include—aside from the “Transitional” group—such
   pieces as: “The Bull,” Dial,LXXII (February, 1922), 156; “The Jungle,” Dial,LXXII
   (February, 1922), 157; “New England,” ContactV (June, 1923); “Paterson,” Dial,LXXXII
   (February, 1927), 91–93; “Young Sycamore,” Dial,LXXXII (March, 1927), 210; “All the
   Fancy Things,” Dial,LXXXII (June, 1927), 476; and “Brilliant Sad Sun,” Dial,LXXXII
   (June, 1927), 478. Other poems remained uncollected still longer. “The Dead Baby,”
   transition,No. 2 (May, 1927), 118, was not republished until An Early Martyr(1935); and
   “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils,” ContactIV (1921), after much pruning and
   rearranging, finally reappeared in Adam & Eve & The City(1936). If it should prove