Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 103

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between ...

Here a fresh juxtaposition of clichés (“pure products ... go crazy”) leads into

precise, natural description that is symbolically resonant (“ribbed north end”

and “isolate lakes”), and on into parallelism that pulls together seemingly

disparate elements in the syndrome of degradation (“lakes and / valleys, ...

deaf-mutes, thieves / old names / and promiscuity”). And later the emptiness

of

succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

is sharpened by a sudden movement into more specific (and suggestive)

naming, the two sequences bound together by sound-pattern:

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

However, this texture could not sustain a mounting intensity for 66
lines without the poem’s major syntactical and prosodic devices.
Syntactically, most of the poem is one long sequence of progressive
subordination—a sequence that is not anticlimactic because it renders the
proliferation of the speaker’s thought. He does not set forth a position;
instead, he discovers and seeks to express the increasingly immediate and
stifling implications of his first brief intuition. Hence the poem’s forward
thrust; and hence the fact that every phrase comes as a presentapprehension.
It is as though the techniques of “Tract” and “Dedication for a Plot of
Ground” were now combined. But that flow of commonplace diction and
progressive subordination plays against a quite regular prosodic structure. By
means of the long-short-long triplets (a more rigorous scheme than the later
triadic line), with each line a unit of attention, Williams renders the varying
pace of the concerned mind, as it feels its way among the data of experience,
rushes on, revises, pauses to give a phrase deliberate weight or ironic point,
searches again, shifts the angle of vision, or suddenly hits upon a new
meaning.
After that sustained and intense sequence of subordination, the