Today’s Poem: Summer Song

William Carlos Williams in a sky-blue necktie

Jo Koster, A Summer Landscape near Hattem, 1915 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Summer Song

by William Carlos Williams

Wanderer moon 
smiling a 
faintly ironical smile 
at this 
brilliant, dew-moistened 
summer morning, — 
a detached 
sleepily indifferent 
smile, a 
wanderer’s smile, — 
if I should 
buy a shirt 
your color and 
put on a necktie 
sky-blue 
where would they carry me?
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William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) — whose “Spring and All” and “Queen-Anne’s Lace” we’ve previously featured — once defined a poem as a machine made of words. That’s a curious metaphor, of course, but it was intended to be. And it was very much of its time. In his 1923 Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier called a house a machine (Une maison est une machine-à-habiter, a machine for living), and he had in mind, as Williams did, a provocative break with old decoration and sentimentality — a modern approach. A modernism.

Certainly Williams’s poems function as things made of words. And yet, in consciously rejecting the metrical foot, occurring in strict patterns, as the basic element from which a poetic line is constructed, he did not reject “the dance of language,” in the words of the poet Lewis Turco (who passed away this past September).

The amateur poet may assume that free verse of the sort that Williams wrote is easy to imitate, because it’s simply chopped-up prose. Yet in today’s Poem of the Day, the 1917 “Summer Song,” we can see Williams’s sense of the “measured line” — a line which, as Turco puts it, “looks, acts, and sounds like prose most of the time,” yet is governed by poetic considerations, chiefly the rhythmic impulses of the words that comprise it

William Carlos Williams in 1921 (Wikimedia Commons)

In this poem, a glimpse of the moon “wandering” from night into daylight, smiling a “faintly ironical smile,” prompts a response from the poet. The accentual lines consist largely of two stressed syllables. That faintly ironical moon-smile has three stresses, as if either the moon paused to smirk at the world beneath it, or the speaker paused to notice it, or possibly both — the strange moon-smile, but also the speaker’s final question, which is the question prompted by the invitation: “Where would they carry me?”

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