explication

Travis VandeNoord English 3072O 708176 Assignment 7 Jan 2, 2014

Explication of “The Dead Baby” by William Carlos William

The themes of the Modernist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often grounded in a sense of realism that was lacking in earlier fiction and poetry. William Carlos Williams focused his poetry on subject matter that revolved around the lives of typical Americans and the events and circumstances of everyday life. Like with other modernist poets, Williams wanted let the poetry represent what it was describing without veiled references and complicate imagery. Modernist poetry was meant to be direct, to the point, and vividly described, while the people and events represented were often taken from the author’s life experiences in order to give a further sense of realism. “The Dead Baby” follows these characteristics of Modern poetry as it depicts a great loss and the aftermath of grief that comes with losing a child. The tragedy of everyday life is often more powerful than that of dramatic fiction.

The first line of the poem immediately describes the prevailing action in the poem of sweeping which is both the actual action of cleaning and metaphoric throughout. In the second line reveals that the person sweeping in not alone as they clean “under the feet of curious holiday seekers.” This line also begins to reveals the stoic setting as visitors appear to looking for a spiritual understanding to the event that have led them to this house. The use of the word “holiday” appears to acknowledge the idea that the “seekers” are taking day off from their typical lives, but it also draws close to its root meaning of holy day as they seek spiritual reckoning for the grief. In line four we ...

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...ies that interpretation further as even health babies arrive from the hospital. The idea of celebrating the life of this child appears to be the focus of this stanza. It is a “white model” of the parents’ lives, a representation of both of them that they are eager to know better amidst their grief. The baby is “surrounded by fresh flowers” which are often around during major celebrations of both life and death. It is reasonable to assume that in this case it might indeed be a celebration and grieving of both.

“The Dead Baby,” gives a perfect example of Modern poetry, as it is direct and vivid in its portrait of an average family’s journey through grief. The details of the child death and the parent situation beyond this moment are undefined, but not matter the heroic or tragic story it could be, the reality and honesty of the poem is strong and beautiful.