Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

WILLIAMS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 153

MUST finish before I can be young again.” His book’s “dynamic energy” roused
D. H. Lawrence and others. Meanwhile the fight against Eliot ’s Eurocentrism
went on. “The Source” goes to rural America upon which so much depends,
a morning pasture

On whose green three maples

are distinctly pressed

beside a red barn

with new shingles in the old...

Those maples “are distinctly pressed” between green and red by a poet-painter,
while his bias for beginnings spots “new shingles in the old.” In rustling spring-
water over uneven stones,

An edge of bubbles stirs

swiftness is molded

Like Frost ’s “West-Running Brook,” where “white water rode the black for-
ever,” this “Source” or spring shows energy finding its own shape—a demo-
cratic American virtue.
In nature as in poems, Williams aims to find the vital form of things, how “the
stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf... quickens.” His little-known “Young Sycamore”
pulses with that barely contained energy.

I must tell you

this young tree

whose round and firm trunk

between the wet

pavement and the gutter

(where water

is trickling) rises

bodily

into the air with

one undulant

thrust half its height—

and then

dividing and waning

sending out

young branches on

all sides—

hung with cocoons

it thins

till nothing is left of it

but two