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“Kipp’s woods, just over the back fence, was our wilderness”—“my magic
forest,” says Williams. “I knew every tree in that wood, from the hickory where
a squirrel had its hole to the last dogwood where in the fall the robins would
gather for the red berries they are so fond of.” Alert to the names and behavior
of things, “What I learned was the way the moss climbed about a tree ’s roots,
what growing dogwood and iron wood looked like; the way rotten leaves will
mat down in a hole—and their smell when turned over.”
He collected insects and butterflies, “but flowers and trees were my peculiar
interest. To touch a tree, to climb it especially, but just to know the flowers
was all I wanted.” Williams went on to compose two hundred flower poems.
“The slender neck of the anemone particularly haunts me for some reason and
the various sorts of violets—the tall blue ones, those with furry stems and the
large, scarce, branching yellow ones, stars of Bethlehem, spring beauties, wild
geranium, hepaticas with three-lobed leaves.” Sent to school in Switzerland,
fifty years later he recalls how the “green-flowered asphodel made a tremendous
impression on me.”
Of course hindsight is not transparent but filtered, sifted. Early impressions
that end up as memories first took root subliminally and then persisted for good
cause. The moments Williams recollects had all along been shaping his sense
of himself, only later to confirm it. “There is a long history in each of us that
comes as not only a reawakening but a repossession when confronted by this
world.” A child ’s response to kaleidoscopic nature feeds into the poet ’s designs
on “this world.” “The tassels of the chestnut—young and old trees, beggar’s
lice, spiders, shining insects—all these things were as much part of my expand-
ing existence as breathing. I was comforted by them. It was an unconscious
triumph all day long just to be able to get out of doors and into my personal
wild world.” And that thought could easily be John Clare ’s.
The child ’s “personal wild world” underwrites the poet ’s key moments, such
as “cheeping birds” resting and feeding on “harsh weedstalks” in “To Waken
an Old Lady.” Williams’s “expanding existence” in childhood would lead to
“the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf ” in “Spring and All,” where “It quickens:
clarity, outline of leaf,” and plant life enters the world: “rooted, they / grip
down and begin to awaken.” Simply the crisped energy in that “stiff curl of
wildcarrot leaf,” new growth taking form, has bred a strain of possibility in
modern poetry.
Born to a half-Sephardic Puerto Rican mother and an English father from
Santo Domingo, Williams came by poetical leanings on his own, knowing from
the outset he ’d need gainful employment. High school thoughts of an ath-
letic career shattered when he collapsed after a hard race, yet this provoked a
poem.