Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 107

The harried

earth is swept

The trees

the tulip’s bright

tips

sidle and

toss— (CEP,68)

And here nouns are “acts as much as verbs.”^14 The last half of “The Wind

Increases” gives in statement and structure that understanding of “actual”

words:

having the form

of motion

At each twigtip

new

upon the tortured

body of thought

gripping

the ground

a way

to the last leaftip (CEP,68f)

Williams considered giving “Della Primavera Trasportata Al Morale” the
subtitle “Words Sans Lines,”^15 as a way of pointing to such structure. But in
“The Bird’s Companion” the loosening (in the first draft) led to a
reconstitution of the line in a new stanza pattern. The tortured body of
thought—the tree discerned in and through the diverse movements of the
leaves—may then appear more clearly in its total rhythm.
“The Sea-Elephant” was in a rough four-line stanza in its earlier drafts.
Revision of this poem meant substantial cutting, reorganizing of details to
produce a symbolic progression d’effet,and counterpointing of syntactical and
line units to give the dynamic structure of advancing perception. The
pruning of this stanza was characteristic: