378 Making It New: 1900–1945poems beyond the moment, eliciting and perhaps quietly stating principles that had
only been implicit in the earlier work. Sometimes, in his later poetry, the desire
to comment on issues is just that, comment. “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955)
illustrates this. Addressed to the poet’s wife, it weaves a lyric meditation out of the
flower of its title: a meditation on love, empathy, and memory and on the human
being’s destructive and creative capacities – “the bomb” and the “grace of the imagi-
nation.” Certainly, the bright, particular asphodel supplies the occasion for all this:
the poet never strays very far from it, or from the sphere of domestic affection. But
there is a degree of generalization springing from the occasion, and the experience
of affection, that the younger Williams would probably never have allowed himself:What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.However, there are other ways in which these later poems begin to comment and
expand. One, also illustrated by “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” or, for that matter,
by the opening poem in Spring and All (1923), “By the road to the contagious
hospital,” is symbolism, or something very close to it. The poet concentrates upon a
particular thing – a flower or, in the case of the Spring and All poem, a day in early
spring – and by the sheer intensity of his concentration, the degree of imaginative
responsiveness he brings to bear, that thing begins to assume additional meanings,
new dimensions. By the end of “By the road to the contagious hospital,” for example,
the poet and reader are still gazing at something specific and mundane: the “waste
of broad, muddy fields” that Williams saw on his way to work at the hospital. The
descriptive detail is such, however, that many other things have been suggested:
the babies in the hospital wards who, like plants, “enter the new world naked / cold,
uncertain of all,” the quickening of the individual imagination (“One by one objects
are defined – / It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf ”), the revival of all life, material
and moral, caught up in the “contagion” of spring. “That is the poet’s business,”
Williams insisted, “Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a
physician works upon a patient, upon the thing before him, in the particular to dis-
cover the universal.” The particularity is still there in such poems, as it was in earlier
work, but the universality is just a little less implicit, a fraction closer to the surface.
The third and probably crucial way in which Williams allowed his later poetry to
expand had to do with his growing concern with structure. “It is a design,” concludes
“The Orchestra” published in The Desert Music (1954), and that precisely is what
many of the later poems are. They are, in the first instance, aural designs that permit
radical variations of rhythm within coherent and often quite complex musical
patterns and, in the second, imaginative designs, verbal tapestries or mosaics that
allow within their framework for significant combinations of detail. As far as
imaginative design is concerned, the exemplary instance is Williams’s epic poem,GGray_c04.indd 378ray_c 04 .indd 378 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM