REVIVING AMERICA WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 145they are buffeted
by a dark wind—
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.Eighteen lines and at the fulcrum a startle—“But what?”
We enter a process of discovery: “Old age is /.. .” What we can’t know is
that this definition-like beginning will be the last we hear of old age. From then
on a landscape unscrolls, of birds, trees, snow, wind, weeds, seeds, and shrill pip-
ing. Like a baking recipe—TO RAISE A SOUFFLÉ—or a medical procedure, “To
Waken an Old Lady” notes each step, leaves us groping, eager for the next—
“But what?” Like a catch breath in singing, each line break at once pauses and
proceeds, stays and goes.
Somethinghappenshere, enacting not recalling. Ear and eye switchback down
the page through an event. Hating what ’s hackneyed, shunning elaboration, the
poem doesn’t COPY reality (Williams liked thumping capitals) but IMITATES,
becomes the mind ’s new reality, the only kind we can grasp inside ourselves. He
jostles us into seeing and hearing with fresh immediacy by jagging his line endings,
playing his own pauses off against habitual speech. “Old age is” should right
away tell us what old age is—but we ’re stopped by a break. Verbs usually fasten
onto their objects—but the birds are held for a moment, “skimming / bare trees.”
So far, things seem bleak: small, skimming, bare, failing, buffeted, dark.
Then midway through, suddenly “But what?” occurs in a brief time-lapse be-
tween present (“they are buffeted”) and past (“the flock has rested”). Now “the
snow / is covered with broken / ”—But what? Seedhusks! Because in one mo-
ment the flock has stripped those husks and fed on seeds. Bare Anglo-Saxon (not
Latinate) syllables, “weedstalks” and “seedhusks” sound dry but tally rhyth-
mically and nearly rhyme, as “seedhusks” save the day in a tongue-crisping,
one-word line of their own. Nature plays out her vicissitudes: wind, yes, but
tempered; tempered, but shrill; shrill, then “piping of plenty,” offering relief
while echoing the falling cadence of “gaining and failing.”
By the end (more like a new beginning) we ’ve all but forgotten the bluff
statement that started this poem. Medically speaking, Dr. Williams’s “Old age
is” turns up a bizarre definition, with seedhusks instead of creaking joints. His