same phenomenon occurs in lines 7–8, where the poet, passing “solitary in
[his] car,” ¤rst surmises (or imagines) that the young housewife is “un-
corseted” and then observes her “tucking in” what the line break anticipates
will be her ®esh, deliciously not yet tucked into her corset, but that turns out
to refer to “stray ends of hair.”
With the image of those sexually charged “stray ends of hair,” the poet’s
erotic fantasy reaches its peak. Williams’s lyric form, James Breslin observed
in what is probably still the best general book on the poet, “renders prosaic
subjects with a tough colloquial ®atness.”^5 But what is interesting is that this
“colloquial ®atness” so easily moves—and this is a Williams trademark—into
a quasi-surrealism, a fantasy state. The young housewife’s appearance, un-
corseted and “in negligee,” may be largely a projection of the poet’s own de-
sire. And the comparison that now follows—“and I compare her / to a fallen
leaf ”—is patently absurd, since no one could seem fresher, younger, more
shyly inexperienced than this young, probably newly married woman, per-
forming her housewifely tasks. The poet may well wish that she would come
to the curb and call out, not to the ice-man or ¤sh-man, but to him! It is only
in foolishly comparing her to a fallen leaf that he can distance himself from
her presence.
And so, in the ¤nal stanza the “noiseless wheels of [his] car / rush with a
crackling sound over / dried leaves”—a puzzle, for how do noiseless wheels
crackle? Perhaps the poet-doctor is just imagining the sound? He knows, in
any case, that normalcy must prevail, that it is 10 a.m. on an ordinary week-
day morning and probably time to make hospital rounds. The desire to “rush
with a crackling sound over / dried leaves” is thus ®eeting and subliminal, a
momentary wish to “have” what belongs to another man. But within the sub-
urban context of the poem, nothing is going to happen. The driver merely
“bow[s] and pass[es] smiling.” Time to move on.
It is only by looking closely at line breaks, syntactic units, and word order
that the delicately comic/erotic tone of “The Young Housewife” can be un-
derstood. If the poet’s is a rape fantasy, it remains ¤rmly in the poet’s mind,
the irony being that the young woman seems largely unaware of his presence.
Indeed, the poet’s self-assertion is itself comic, as in the silly internal rhyme:
Stray ends of hair, and I compare herAnd this line also contains an echo of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” In the same vein, the alliteration of h’s in lines 2 and 3—“behind,”
“her,” “husband’s house”—gives the lines a breathlessness connoting antici-
pation rather than any kind of serious plot.
xvi Introduction