160 PA RT T W O
Turning seventy, disabled by a heart attack and harsh strokes, Williams
worked on a long love poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” For a boy
in Switzerland, the “green-flowered asphodel made a tremendous impression
on me,” so he pressed it in a book with other flowers, and much later found it
growing in New Jersey too. Now this mortal man’s poem entreats Flossie, his
wife, “Listen while I talk on / against time.”
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem—
save that it ’s green and wooden—
I come, my sweet,
To sing to you.Threefold pacing opens a way to move and breathe. Denise Levertov, whom
Williams valued, calls it a swift yet stately pace “to express formally a hard-
earned wisdom.”
Storm and sea, “sea wrack / and weeds” enter this poem, and “starfish / stiff-
ened by the sun,”
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.Still the atom bomb pervades several pages, while
Every drill
driven into the earth
for oil enters my side
also.
Waste, waste!Yet flowers crop up that the man and woman have loved over the years: apple
blossom, pink mallow, wild plum, lily, honeysuckle, daisy, violet. “Only the
imagination is real!” he cries once again, and (like Coleridge): “But love and
the imagination / are of a piece.” Williams died in 1963, five weeks after Frost
and just as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was awakening modern environmental
consciousness.
“Poetry is news that stays news,” his buddy Ezra Pound had said. Here then
are his lines that stay freshest in mind, reviving whenever human spirit needs
them: