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Aug. 30th, 2008 12:48 amThe teacher and most everyone else thought this was a 2nd-wave-style feminist poem, a self-criticism for Gazing (tm):
The Young Housewife, William Carlos Williams
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
It's not, but it's fascinating how much it looks like one. Male poets probably ought to have a art-makingly intense interest in whatever awful subtle things men do to women but, to understate, most of the time they don't, esp. c. 1915. I actually liked this one, when I'd puzzled it out...I think the only other Williams poem that ever did anything for me was the sick hospital one. The plum poem makes me crazy--no poem annoys me more, except possibly Millay's Recuerdo (I know the early 20-C. Vassar accent too well, which makes it worse). This poem's handling of speed and sequence is subtle and lovely, as is its reframing of Keats' most influential verse-thought. And while completely innocent of feminism, I don't think it can be fairly attacked as sexist using any sane definition of the term.
In Spring term a professor almost convinced me that The Faerie Queene Book 3 was about the Gaze (tm). But you know what? Not quite. Maybe a gaze, but not that one.
The Young Housewife, William Carlos Williams
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
It's not, but it's fascinating how much it looks like one. Male poets probably ought to have a art-makingly intense interest in whatever awful subtle things men do to women but, to understate, most of the time they don't, esp. c. 1915. I actually liked this one, when I'd puzzled it out...I think the only other Williams poem that ever did anything for me was the sick hospital one. The plum poem makes me crazy--no poem annoys me more, except possibly Millay's Recuerdo (I know the early 20-C. Vassar accent too well, which makes it worse). This poem's handling of speed and sequence is subtle and lovely, as is its reframing of Keats' most influential verse-thought. And while completely innocent of feminism, I don't think it can be fairly attacked as sexist using any sane definition of the term.
In Spring term a professor almost convinced me that The Faerie Queene Book 3 was about the Gaze (tm). But you know what? Not quite. Maybe a gaze, but not that one.
