William Carlos Williams, “To a Poor Old Woman”
William Carlos Williams, Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
I’m struck, as I remember what I wrote when I first sent this out, by how easily William Carlos Williams’ short masterwork follows from the Wordsworth poem, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” I had sent out several weeks before.
The poems move in very different directions, the voices enunciating them are deeply dissimilar. One rhymes, the other doesn’t; one is metrical, the other isn’t.
Yet both poems, as can be seen from the passage that I cited from Wordsworth’s famous “Preface” to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, prioritize the language of everyday life over the language we usually ascribe to “the viewless wings of poesy,” as Keats so memorably called it. Wordsworth writes of death and cessation while Williams celebrates life and discovery and process, but the means they adopt to tell us what they have to say: these means are similar.
This is a good moment to stop briefly to say something I believe to be profoundly true, and something that is true not just for the folks who majored in English in college. How we say things is as important as what we say. Although his famous phrase quickly became trite and sort of meaningless, Marshall McLuhan was right when he insisted, ‘The medium is the message.”
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her handThey taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to herYou can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her handComforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
– William Carlos Williams, 1935
Before considering William Carlos Williams’ wonderful, stunning poem “To a Poor Old Woman,” let me speak briefly about poems. Although at first it may appear extraneous, I think you’ll find this short introduction is not all that far from much that this poem touches upon.
Hard times come into all our lives. Some are large, some are small and temporary. One of the most serious issues I recurrently find myself asking is: in the face of troubles, of what use are poems?
In the first section of his brilliant late long poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” – to my mind, along with Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem” one of the two greatest poems of the twentieth century – William Carlos Williams speaks to his wife in lines I have already cited in writing about Zbigniew Herbert, lines so trenchant they bear repeating:
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
I would not go so far as to say this is always true. In extreme situations, ones in which each of us faces great suffering or the implacable finality of death, most poems, most music, most paintings, may seem beside the point. The abyss we sometimes face – for many of us, fortunately, that we rarely face – tends to swallow up esthetic satisfactions just like it swallows up almost everything else.
The poet Matthew Arnold, perhaps the greatest English literary critic of the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote of “touchstones,” of lines or passages of poetry which combined artistic excellence with what he called “high seriousness.” He said we could use such lines to test out poems, to see which poems are of enduring merit and worth. I’d say, using his term but in a different way, that life is the touchstone by which we measure poems: the greatest poems, the best poems, the most sincere and authentic poems, are those which can sustain us even when – particularly when – we are not in a position to tolerate artistic folderol. When life has us up against a wall, the hand of fate or mortality against our throat: when a poem in that situation can sustain us or at least speak to us, then we know that we are in the presence of a ‘real’ poem.
I recently returned to Arnold’s essay, The Study of Poetry” [1880] because I wanted to make sure I would be using the word ‘touchstone’ correctly. I found the essay far more concerned with “high seriousness’ than I remembered at a distance of perhaps forty years. But I also found something appropriate to Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman.”
In Arnold’s essay, he compares two poets of who were his not-too-distant predecessors, Robert Burns and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He truly surprises in the passage I am about to cite, because he has been going on about “high seriousness” with a schoolmasterly and even pedantic seriousness which does not prepare one for the passage which follows. In it, he compares four lines from Shelley’s poetic drama Prometheus Unbound – beautiful language, large human issues, deep philosophical interests – with a Burns poem:
For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will be, - of that beautiful spirit building his many - coloured haze of words and images
`Pinnacled dim in the intense inane’ -
no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and soundest. Side by side with the `On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .`
of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from Tam Glen: -
`My minnie does constantly deave me
And bids me beware o` young men;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;
But wha can think sae o` Tam Glen?’[1]
What is surprising I think in Arnold’s preference of Burns, here, is that Burns is in no way full of “high seriousness.” What he is full of is a love of the Scots language as it is spoken (I guess we could call it a dialect) and a directness and simplicity in the verse. For what the speaker of the poem is telling us, as reading the entire poem makes even more clear, is that she is in love with a young man named Tam Glen, and compared to her love all her mother’s warnings are just chatter.
Which brings us to Williams’ poem. What is immediately striking is the poet’s embrace of the vernacular, of English as it is spoken. Well, to be precise, of American English as it is spoken. In the title the woman is described simply – she’s poor, she’s old – and as the poem commences she is munching a plum. (I’d be willing to bet five bucks that if I asked any twenty of you reading this to write a poem about the dinner you ate last night, the Shelley-like seriousness of ‘I’m writing a poem and so my language has to be suitable to a poem’ would mean an un-pretty word like “munch’ would not appear in at a minimum nineteen of the poems. This despite the fact that we live two hundred and nine years after Wordsworth famously declared of his Lyrical Ballads, what I cited in my previous chapter:
There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men.
‘Munch’? ‘They taste good to her’? ‘A paper bag of them’? With words like these, we are in the realm of the vernacular, and the boundary between what we say in everyday life and what the poet writes is close to erased.
The only word a five year old child would not understand in this poem is the word “solace.” The only two words that derive from Latin, and not Anglo-Saxon, are “solace” and “comforted.” We’ll look at these two words later.
More. I am sure you’ve noticed, that of the sort of eight sentences in the poem (it’s not entirely clear what makes a sentence here, so there could easily be less, like seven or six), four are exactly the same sentence: “They taste good to her.”
Well, you say, not EXACTLY the same. Bravo. Bravo. Because in that middle stanza, the sentence is broken up in different ways. (The technical term for a line ending at a place where a sentence does not break – ending at a place where a pause does not come as indicated by a period, comma, semi-colon, colon, dash, or even just the unpunctuated ending of a phrase – is enjambment.)
I have often been astonished by how hard many students worked to find a ‘meaning’ to a poem, as if it were a cipher to be decoded. Working so hard, they often missed an important linguistic truth, as revelatory in poems as it is in human beings. When we use a word several times, it is usually because that word is important to what we are saying or, in the case of our everyday activities, it is a revelation of what obsesses us, or who we are. ‘Look at repeated words,’ I say to my students, ‘even without understanding a bit of the syntax, or what the sentences declare, you can get at a good part of what the poet is saying if she repeats a word twice, or even three times, in a poem.’
What are we to make of this poem, then, in which Williams repeats not a word but a sentence four times: “They taste good to her”? The import of the line (not the meaning of the poem, since I strongly believe searching for meanings is counterproductive in reading poems: we should look at what the poet says, not at some ‘meaning’ she or he has hidden beneath a torrent of words) is simple: the plums taste good to the old woman.
For this is a poem about an old woman who is eating plums, and those plums, well, “They taste good to her.” In the second stanza, the sentence in its second and third iteration is broken by enjambment. In the second line, the poet tells us they taste really, really good to her. The line ending – “they taste good/to her” stresses how good! they taste. Similarly, the next line ends with “taste” because the poem sees/intuits that the plums are not only good, but that the goodness comes from the tasting. The old woman is engaged in tasting the plums. It is as if an experience is unfolding for the observant poet: as Williams watches the old woman, through the exercise of empathy he feels what she is experiencing: the plums taste good, they are really good, and moreover she loves this taste of ripe plums.
O.K. The poem, especially in stanza two, is about how good plums taste, and its language, even though simple and repetitive (they taste good to her, three times over) manages to convey not only ‘good’ and ‘taste’ but the process of tasting. In these repetitions, we feel the woman rolling each new bite of plum around her mouth, giving herself over to the experience (“she gives herself/ to the one half/ sucked out in her hand”) with attentiveness, so that she not only savors the plums but differentiates the constituents of her tasting.
Williams the poet, I would strongly suggest (if I were more bold here, I would insist), is doing something comparable and parallel. He tastes the language, our shared American language, our language at its most simple and elemental. He too savors what he is giving himself over to: he rolls the words around in his mouth (and ours too, as we read the poem) so that he can taste the language. He too sorts out its different possibilities. Five words broken down, five words on which he focuses his attention and ours.
So, we have seen thus far, our simple fifteen line poem is doing two things. It celebrates the American vernacular, and it celebrates the poet’s ability – which is our ability as well since we too use language – to savor language and what it can do.
It also, of course, tells us that the woman is enjoying the plums: after all, they taste good to her.
Let me modestly contradict what I wrote a moment ago: this poem has one more line than the fifteen we see in the four stanzas. It has sixteen lines: the title is an integral part of the poem, as we might guess from the fact that all the stanzas but the first have four lines. That title is part of the first stanza as well as a framing device.
For this is not just a poem about someone enjoying plums. It is about an old woman enjoying plums, an old woman who is also poor. In this context, the first stanza comes as something of a surprise: we tend to assign impetuousness, urgency, a willingness to buck social norms (eating on the street the food you have bought for home) to the young. But here it is an old woman who is eating this juicy, perhaps dripping, fruit: right there on the street! Not over a plate or with a napkin in hand: right out of that paper bag the grocer put them in.
She sucks that plum away from the pit (of course! We don’t eat plums the way we do cookies or candy bars: there is a pit, and if we want all the goodness of the fruit, we not only bite into it – we are back to that “munching” in line one— but we suck at what is attached to the pit so we can get all the goodness and sweetness, and not leave some of it behind). As the poor old woman sucks it, the plum becomes her world: “You can see it by/ the way she gives herself/ to the one half/sucked out in her hand.” She is absorbed by it, into that wonderful sense of taste that the second stanza emphasized.
What happens next in the poem is particularly remarkable. What the title has framed for us is that this woman is old and not young, poor, with apparently not much going for her, with nothing ahead except struggling with “bodily decrepitude” (the phrase is from Yeats) and an unrelenting poverty. For let us not forget: this is an old, poor, woman. And yet, and yet: she is “comforted.” She has found “solace.” And the solace and the comfort come from the ripe plums in her bag, in her hand, in the taste of them in her mouth.
For me, after many, many readings of the poem, what stands out is the word that doesn’t quite belong in the easy vernacular of the poem: “solace.” The poem is about plums and about tasting and about tasting good, but it is also about solace.
Impoverished in social fact, the poor and old woman is rich in this moment of experience, for the ripe plums and the comfort they bring seem “to fill the air.” Though old, the pleasures of the flesh surround and overwhelm – and comfort! – her as she sucks on this plum and its flavor becomes a taste not of plums but of solace and comfort.
A confession: when I was younger, I kept running into the term ‘transcendence.” Emerson and Thoreau were Transcendentalists (I myself never use the term, and don’t understand its usefulness); religion I learned from books promised transcendent experience; professors told me that education would allow me and my peers to transcend the mundane trivia of everyday life. I didn’t understand transcendence then, and maybe I still don’t.
Williams comprehends something very powerful in this poem: the necessity in this world, and our being in it, is perhaps not to find transcendence but to accept immanence. The poem reveals to us the solace to be found in being firmly rooted in this world and embracing (“tasting”) what it offers, not what is offered by some transcendent elsewhere.
This poem celebrates immanence: the comfort and solace that are available through the senses, through the body, through an immersion in the physical world.
Williams himself will come close to seeking the transcendent: for him, it will be love and beauty, and he will search for them in the magisterial “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” that I mentioned at the outset, although even there love and beauty are ultimately found in the immanent, in his wife and the verses of Homer. In this poem, “To a Poor Old Woman,” he unequivocally celebrates the immanent world. And the American language we can celebrate it in. And the wonders of language itself, which we roll about our tongues and taste as the woman tastes the plum, for language grants us comfort and solace, even when a plum is not handy.
Plums, language, the American vernacular: as the poem concludes, “They taste good to her.” And to Williams. And, hopefully after we have read this poem, to us, also.
Footnotes
[1] The ‘coursers’ in the Shelley passage are the horses which will pull Phoebus Apollo’s chariot – the sun – around the globe to bring the dawn and day; the Burns passage, translated into modern English from the Scots, might be rendered,
My mother does constantly stun me with her noise,
Bidding me beware of young men.
They flatter, she says, to deceive me -
But who can think so of Tam Glen?