 |
Queen-Anne's-Lace by William Carlos Williams |
Summary and Analysis
Queen-Anne's-Lace by William
Carlos William is unconventional in its theme and subverts the traditional idea
of 'female as flower' in the poem. The title comes from the name of a flower
that grows in open grassy fields, and being white, which is identified with the
image of female like vulnerable, tender, fragile, beautiful, and transient
flower.
But the poet refuses to
identify the female with flower and replaces it with the image of 'field'; the
woman is more like a field, creative or fertile and sustaining life. Another
thing the poet does in this poem is frankly (though not explicitly) confesses
his male desires related to the female body. The poem also rejects the
traditional idea of virginity, whiteness and piety. "Here is no question
of whiteness... a pious wish to whiteness gone over — or nothing". The
poet claims that the female body is not white like the white flower, but is
more like "a field/ of the wild carrot taking the field by force".
This image of a carrot is potentially sexual; and this is reinforced by the
'white desire' that the field evokes in the speaker. Poetry is a reign of the
desires, including that of the sun-poet. The restraints are gone, or they must
go. The Dionysian revelry with the field and female is not to be denied, for
there is nothing more natural than this ‘desire'. What is artificial is the
ideas imposed on the nature of things by our cultures.
Queen-Anne's-Lace is a
poem that refutes traditional metaphor of floral imagery to female attributes.
Poets have so often tended to link women with flowers that it has become a
cultural commonplace; in fact, the association has become automatic. But
Williams forestalls that automatic culture reflex. He begins with a negative
"Her body is not so white”. He then removes the woman's body from
decorative images of flowers and asks us to think in terms of a field. Later,
he moves to the larger metaphor: the field plus the flowers in the field. The
poem is a refusal to accept the aristocratic and old conservative reserve and
high mindedness. While evoking the old poet, the new poet has also tried to
displace the old ideas as fixed. Here again we come to the idea of the poet's
perpetual struggle to overcome the Oedipal complex due to the impacts of the
old poets. Here the poet has partly violated the norm, but we can see, whether
it is intended or not, that he has come squarely round to the same idea of
poetry as a vehicle of expressing desire. Here, where there is desire, love,
warmth and fertility, whiteness does not reign supreme, "white
desire" collapses into the "nothing".
At the end of the poem when
the imaginative ecstatic union of the male sun-poet with the female field of
flowers has reached its orgasmic height, the poet is thrown back on himself, on
his own separate consciousness. This consciousness is both the anxiety of
influence and the attempt to belong to the community of the archetypal
sun-poet.
No comments: