149“source then a blue as”
Williams and the Environmental News
here is a constant barrier between the
reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world,” says William
Carlos Williams in Spring and All (1923). He ’d just helped start a little magazine,
Contact,calling for “contact between words and the locality that breeds them, in
this case America.” Local, the native environs—which is why Eliot ’s defection
inThe Waste Land “struck like a sardonic bullet.” Nothing so marks Williams,
over five decades, as this urge to cleanse our consciousness.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickensJust how much depends upon the barrow, the water, the chickens? And what
exactly depends on them?
Try removing the first pair of lines. Without them it ’s a pleasant sort of haiku.
With them, a crying need, as the poem’s one fancy word, “depends,” literally
hangs over this scene. “Somuch”: with no limit, maybe everything depends
“
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