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To Elsie

By William Carlos Williams 1883–1963

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938, 1944, 1945 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Collected Poems: Volume I 1909-1939 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945)

Biography

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own . . .

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