Nantucket by William Carlos Williams

First published: 1934, in Collected Poems, 1921-1931

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Nantucket” by William Carlos Williams is a short lyric poem of five two-line stanzas, which vividly describes a room, presumably on the Atlantic island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts. The poem consists entirely of Imagistic phrases, noting the flowers through the window, the sunshine, a glass tray, a glass pitcher and tumbler, a key, and finally “the/ immaculate white bed.” It reads like a verbal still-life, painterly in its precise rendering of things seen and adding to sight another sensual appeal: the “Smell of cleanliness.”

Similar to Williams’s more famous “The Red Wheelbarrow” in its sharp focus and love for what is ordinary, the poem, within its own small frame, is richly colored and shaped. It creates clean, fresh, airy intimate space, beginning with the enticing and benedictory view from a window and ending, as if inevitably, at a bed, which seems equally luminous and inviting. The poet’s palette is limited but lush: lavender and yellow set off by white, the color that sunshine takes on in late afternoon, and the translucent noncolor of glass. This is a vision of pleasure: composed, quiet, secure, anticipatory, reminiscent of some imagined room painted by seventeenth century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer before people have entered it, or an eroticized interior by the modern French painter Henri Matisse. Here is a poem of unswerving objectivity and directness, a poem seemingly without an “I” or any other protagonist, and yet the poem proclaims gladly the subjectivity of the eye, which can glean secret meaning from the very surfaces of objects, from their casual proximity to one another, from their compositional interactions.

The poem showcases Williams’s affinity for the modernist school of Imagism, which extolled economical use of language, concentration, rhythmic individuality, and a commitment to presenting “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” in poet Ezra Pound’s memorable phrase. “Nantucket” resists making symbols of the contents of the room it portrays. Yet the poem in its entirety could be said to be a metaphor that suppresses its own tenor, letting the vehicle speak clearly and suggestively. Like the traditional Japanese poetic form, haiku, the poem restricts its subject matter to objective description that nevertheless evokes a definite, albeit unstated, emotional response. Williams was often beguiled by a similar discipline of suggesting a very great deal in the fewest possible words, and he chose ordinary words from spoken American English. In this poem, he declines even the ambiguous commentary of lines such as “So much depends/ upon,” or “these things/ astonish me beyond words,” which leaven the strict Imagism in two others of his small poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Pastoral,” respectively.

Forms and Devices

Williams’s stanza form was not inherited, but finely honed by his intense personal engagement with his subject. Each of the stanzas in “Nantucket” is composed of two lines of almost equal length. Each of these lines contains two or three accented syllables, rendering it light but chiseled, casual-seeming, and yet composed. At first the lines enjamb on nouns and adjectives of solid description, but by line 8, which ends with the pronoun “which,” and line 9, ending with the phrase “And the,” enjambment on less weighty words causes anticipation of the poem’s most emotionally freighted items: the key and the bed.

Three devices contributing to the delicate, brilliant sound and feel of the poem are the four aerated white spaces between stanzas, the reliance solely on dashes for internal punctuation, and the lack of any closing punctuation. This last leaves the impression that there is indeed more to say about “the/ immaculate white bed,” which has been so magnificently introduced by a midline, uppercase “And,” itself introduced by one of those breathless dashes.

The poem is built of six noun phrases, subjects that promise to lead to verbs and then do not, deferring all action to beyond or after the poem, and thereby riveting the reader’s attention on the objects at hand, while increasing the sense that there is more here than meets the eye, and more that could be expressed. The poem relies heavily on prepositions—“through,” “by,” “of,” “on,” “by”—which reveal to the reader’s visual imagination the compositional integrity of the piece, despite its teasingly incomplete sentences.

Rather than the directness of rhyme, Williams uses smaller, more subtle sound repetitions to weave his poem together, to give it supple form. “Yellow” echoes “window” in the first stanza, as do the -er endings of “flowers” and “lavender.” Alliteration works its understated way through the poem: “curtains” and “cleanliness”; “tray,” “tumbler,” and “turned.” In a poem devoid, in true Imagist fashion, of superfluous words, the repetition of the word “glass,” tying together stanzas 3 and 4, speaks emphatically and reminds the reader of the capacity of glass to catch and reflect light. In a poem built primarily of quiet, forward-moving iambics, the ending spondee of “white bed” impresses the reader’s ear with its sudden substance. The insistence on words indicating cleanliness reveals the poet’s yearning for a romantic experience both passionate and wholesome, both voluptuous and chaste, purged of guilt and capable of expressing full joie de vivre.

Williams resisted symbolism because he felt it too readily and perfunctorily gave up the thing itself for an imposed or imported meaning. However, here the window, the key, the bed, and the glass all declare the beauty and particularity of their physical forms—their ideal reality, their radiant tangibility. This has the paradoxical effect of renewing the symbolic depth and urgency of these objects as potent indicators of intimacy, chosen attributes of a room that will declare its emotional character, if only the reader attends to it as devotedly as does the poet.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.

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Bremen, Brian A. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Copestake, Ian D., ed. Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann W. William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Gish, Robert. William Carlos Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Laughlin, James. Remembering William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1995.

Lenhart, Gary, ed. The Teachers and Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1998.

Lowney, John. The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. 1981. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Vendler, Helen, ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Random House, 1987.

Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1989.