154 PA RT T W O
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the topA priming gesture—“I must tell you,” “So much depends”—gets life go-
ing here, sends sap rising through six cognate bunchings up into “this young
tree.”
Up, and of course down the page, as we read. This tree “rises / bodily”
through the body of its poem. Tracing the shape, the growth itself of a young
sycamore, old-fashioned grammar and syntax come into play. First of all, does
“I must tell you” take “this young tree” as its object, as in “tell you” a story? Or
after “I must tell you” do we pause, to begin a sentence of which “this young
tree” is the subject? Or maybe both?
Greeting each line in time, right away we ’re deflected by a subordinate
clause: “this young tree / whose round and firm trunk.. .” Then, expecting
“trunk” to take its own verb, instead we get a prepositional phrase: “between
the wet / pavement and the gutter.” And then again, a parenthesis abuts the
gutter, “(where water is trickling).” Eventually our original tree seems to find
its verb:
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk... rises
bodily
But on close inspection it ’s the trunk that “rises bodily,” not the tree.
Wait as we will, no verb for “this young tree” comes along. What matters is
process. We watch the trunk rising “with one undulant thrust half its height,”
whether wave- or snake- or phallus-like. Halfway through, the poem takes
on present participles, “dividing and waning / sending out,” and then adds a
past participle, “hung with cocoons”—branchings aplenty, both arboreal and
grammatical. Whitman celebrated the “free growth” of poems as they “bud...
unerringly” like “lilacs or roses on a bush.” For Williams the trunk “rises bodily
... and then... it thins.” By this time a generic “tree” has found its “round and
firm” body, the poem’s form organic to its substance.
Even now, with almost nothing left of it, “Young Sycamore” still surprises.
Its bottom lines sprout its treetop, and these hints of old age—eccentric, knot-
ted, bending forward, hornlike—must actually be young buds, holding new life
like the hanging cocoons. Tendril lines with no comma or period, crisp edgings
“knotted” and “hornlike,” thrust the tree close, alive to sight and touch. We feel
firsthand, present, the poem’s body language “transfused with the same forces
which transfuse the earth.”