Today’s Poem: Queen-Anne’s Lace

William Carlos Williams’s Metaphysical rejection of metaphysics

Charles Warren Eaton, Queen Anne’s Lace at Sunset, 1895 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Queen-Anne’s Lace

by William Carlos Williams

Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth — nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibers of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over —
or nothing.
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There’s something almost Metaphysical about the 1921 poem “Queen-Anne’s Lace,” by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). For all its modernist mannerisms — particularly in its elevation of image as idea — the way the poem employs its central conceit is precisely the way the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets (John Donne, George Herbert, & Co.) called images into play.

Take for example the best-known poem of the American Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642–1729), a second-generation Metaphysical born in England little more than a decade after the deaths of his Anglican forerunners Donne (1572–1631) and Herbert (1593–1633), but transplanted in 1668 to American soil.  His poem “Huswifery” takes for its conceit, or central metaphor, the process of cloth-making.

That poem expends many of its eighteen lines in naming the parts and actions of a spinning wheel and a loom. God is the “housewife” who works at spinning and weaving to clothe a soul in the glorious robes of righteousness. As readers, we never lose sight of the spinning wheel and loom as literal objects. The spiritual process of sanctification is grounded in the materiality of these things. We understand them in their thing-ness, even as we understand that the poem really isn’t about making cloth at all.

All this is worth holding in mind when reading Williams. “Queen-Anne’s Lace” feels like a response to the metaphysical tradition. It feels, too, like this poet’s particular gesture at translating that tradition into a new idiom. Robert Frost and others of his generation had sat (metaphorically) at the feet of the great English poets, but Williams was uniquely a “begetter,” as the critic M.L. Rosenthal put it, of a “truly American poetry” that would aspire to do what great poetry in the English-language tradition had done, in modes presumably organic to the tumultuous energy of early-20th-century America, its particular landscapes, and its peculiar beauties.

Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, 1924 (Wikimedia Commons)

We might well remark that just as American culture in general owes much to its English roots, so does American poetry. And so we have, in Today’s Poem, as in Edward Taylor’s, an American conversation with those roots. Though Williams resists the imposed shape of a clear and consistent traditional form, the lines venture out from and return to the mean of accentual trimeter, before resolving, ultimately in a line of a single stressed syllable (two if you read or as stressed). 

But most interestingly, this poem engages the Metaphysical tradition, turning on the conceit of a common weed. It’s an apt conceit for Williams’s project. Queen-Anne’s Lace, a variety of wild carrot, escaped from colonial transplants of European origin, to bloom today in delicate profusion across all the temperate zones of America. Like so much else in the American landscape, both physical and metaphorical, it didn’t originate here, but it has made itself at home with us. It recalls European scenes and remakes American ones — but never precisely in the image of anywhere in Europe. 

“Queen-Anne’s Lace” makes clear from its first line, as Taylor’s “Huswifery” does, that an extended metaphor is about to ensue. “Her body is not so white as,” it begins, and then promptly dives down a horticultural rabbit hole first of unlikeness, then of likeness. The woman’s body is not so white as the petals of the anemone, which is in fact the flower with the “purple mole at its center,” like a blemish where too-delicate skin has been touched. It is, rather, like something far less rarified. 

Unlike the anemone, Queen Anne’s Lace is not “remote” or fragile, but profligate. It spreads everywhere, “taking the field by force” and drowning out the grass. When touched, this woman’s body, which is like that profligate wild carrot, doesn’t blemish, but “blossoms.” Desire, like the wildflower, multiplies itself until the body, like the field, is consumed by it. This might be understood as its own kind of purity: “a pious wish to whiteness gone over.”

Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything. In its last line, paradoxically, Williams’ Metaphysical poem seems to reject metaphysics. After all, perhaps the image means only itself. It implies no higher reality. What it does is only the biologically determined action of its kind. Like the body for which it serves as a metaphor, the flower, in the end, is a only a flower, a material thing, literal and amoral. 

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