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

WILLIAMS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 157

If all poems are quest poems, few home in on their goal so winningly, each
tapered cluster focusing in on an action, an event.
“Iris” wants gradual unscrolling, line-by-line seeking, like “To Waken an
Old Lady” with its pivotal “But what?” Below a title that gives nothing away,
Williams explodes “a burst of iris so that /... ”—so that what? Leaning into
the line break we look for what happens now, but the next line tucks in a time-
frame: “a burst of iris so that / [having] come down for / breakfast.. .” Before
breakfasting “we searched through the /... ,” and every run-on line keeps the
search open—“But what?”

through the / rooms

rooms for / that

that / sweetest odor

and at / first

could not / find

its / source

then a blue as / of the sea

Urging us on by staying and going at every moment, Williams reinvents the
lyric poem, much as Eadweard Muybridge invented the motion picture at Stan-
ford by making frame-by-frame stills of a trotting horse.
Narrowing the quest, each triplet in “Iris” draws eye and ear across stanza
breaks by echoing their opening words: “searched... sweetest... source...
startling.” And rightly, “source” touches off the poem’s strangest verse, a wild
fragment, a painter’s daub:

source then a blue as

Williams wasn’t given to simile-mongering, but his

source then a blue as

of the sea

abruptly opens this event to something oceanic, primordial. Then a triple stress
spanning three lines—sea / struck / / startling—shocks us deeper than words.
Sweet smell has led to a sight of blue that blooms trumpeting petals, a shape and
sound of overnight-bursting iris, the origin now the goal.
“His only decent poems,” Yvor Winters brusquely rebuked a first-year pro-
fessor in 1965, “are very early and very short!” But aren’t there fine short later
poems by Williams, such as “Iris,” and early long poems too, all fed by a lifelong
current?
In “The Wanderer” a young poet merged with “The Passaic, that filthy river”
(well before the “empty bottles, sandwich papers” in Eliot ’s Thames river), as
it bore him “Eddying back cool and limpid / Into the crystal beginning of its
days.” Decades later that same New Jersey source impels Paterson, the five-book