Deriving Meaning from William Carlos Williams', The Young Housewife

Deriving Meaning from William Carlos Williams', The Young Housewife

Everything depends on perspective. The uniqueness we bring to our reading is essential to the absorption of poems with Imagist elements. An example of this is the poem, "The Young Housewife", by William Carlos Williams.

Perhaps it was a streak of laziness on my part, but I had very little imagination to offer this poem. Having had no experience as such, I didn't identify with the young housewife, the fish-man, the ice-man, or even the dramatically fallen leaf. What I initially saw was a jumble of thoughts arranged neatly into three very brief verses.

The biographical information about the author provided in the Third Edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature¹ describes Williams' writings as reflections on the "...disjunction of modern life in broken lines and flashes of incomplete thought." Exactly. Only, I was left to wonder how it could be that this was meant by the biographer to be complimentary. Seems to me that somewhere along the way I picked up the notion that incomplete thoughts were a bad thing....

Granted, the concept of Imagism is not lost on me. Read after read of this poem led me to believe that it is very true that reality is created in the act of our perceiving it. I could take on any perspective or mindset and find applicable passages that would lend themselves wholeheartedly to whatever arguments of meaning I could come up with. Perhaps I have an imagination after all.

Considering the lack of natural meaning that I initially got out of the poem, I ended up doing a systematic dissection of the lines to extract a meaning I could expound upon. Despite the fact that doing this meant go...

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...ing.

Here we have the husband taking action in his own way to ensure that his leaf remain not only under a watchful eye, but also under the thumb of his silent, yet ultimately draining, power. Little thought is obviously given to whether the leaf itself remains young and vibrant or if it slowly dries up. Williams use of visual writing enables the poem to close with a vivid flourish and a tone of smugness as the narrator finally passes by with a bow and a smile. You sense the crushing of another leaf whom he'd help to fall unwittingly. It's a stretch, yes, but when you read the poem with the sympathy this theory evokes, its meaning is changed and so too is your view. There's suddenly a reason for this poem.

1.) Lauter, Paul (1998). pg. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition.

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