two bridges across
river one closed for repairs
other for painting

Education a Failure

The minor stupidities
of my world
dominate that world—
as when

with two bridges across
the river and one
closed for repairs
the other also

will be closed by
the authorities
for painting! But then
there is heaven

and the ideal state
closed also
before the aspiring soul.
I had rather

watch a cat threading
a hedge with
another sitting by
while the bird

screams overhead
athrash
in the cover of the
low branches.

As published in The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams (James Laughlin: Norfolk, Connecticut, 1944).

According to Wikipedia, “William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His Spring and All (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). In his five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as “my ‘case’ to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the ‘thought.'” Some of his best-known poems, “This Is Just to Say” and “The Red Wheelbarrow”, are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem “The Great Figure” inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth. Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).”

The Great Figure

By William Carlos Williams
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

feelings and feelings
feelings and feelings – let me
try thinking instead

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

From the rational point of view, what new factor has H’s death introduced into the problem of the universe?

What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe?

I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily.

I would have said that I had taken them into account.

I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness.

We were even promised sufferings.

They were part of the programme. We were even told ‘Blessed are they that mourn’ and I accepted it.

I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.

Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination.

Yes;

but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this?

No.

And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern.

The case is too plain.

If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards.

The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.

The taking them into account was not real sympathy.

If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came.

It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled

‘Illness’,

‘Pain’,

‘Death’

and ‘Loneliness’.

I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

Of course

it is different when the thing happens to oneself,

not to others,

and in reality,

not in imagination.