DECISIONS AND REVISIONS

INTRO: Here are two versions of "Young Woman at a Window" by William Carlos Williams. In the second version, Williams adheres more steadfastly to the ideas of the imagist movement. My essay for my Modern American Poetry class examines and cross-examines the differences between the two. For more information on the imagist movement, link to Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658

Young Woman at a Window  (version 1)

 

While she sits
there

with tears on
her cheek

her cheek on
her hand

this little child
who robs her

knows nothing of
his theft

but rubs his
nose

 

Young Woman at a Window  (version 2)

 

She sits with
tears on

her cheek
her cheek on

her hand
the child

in her lap
his nose

pressed
to the glass

 

 

DECISIONS AND REVISIONS

or

MIDDLE-AGED POET AT A WINDOW

 

 

    In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

                                                                         T. S. Eliot

“Young Woman at a Window”—the very title calls to mind painting. In fact, it is the title of a painting by Paul Gaugin—an impressionistic painting of a young woman wistfully gazing at the viewer, the window behind her open to a glorious mottled sky. The painting here by William Carlos Williams is shorn of the softness of impressionism. There is no kind wash of delicate hues blending gently into another. This poem is more like the clinical observation of a psychoanalyst—the doctor stating what he observes. And isn’t observation the prerequisite of a good doctor? If you do not observe correctly and dispassionately, then you do not diagnose correctly. And so, with “Young Woman at a Window,” my dear ModPos, we enter deeply into one of the primary markers of the imagist manifesto. Clarity, not charity.

Here, Professor Al, by presenting two versions, graciously allows us to watch, like student interns in a operating theatre, the intense, delicate, tricky surgery of revision. What is happening here? What is being cut away? When the poem is moved into the recovery room, what has changed and why?

On an obvious level, there are fewer words in version two. We have gone from twenty-nine to twenty-three words. Only six words less, you might say, but in a poem of this brevity, six words are a lot. Just as in haiku (also an image centric genre), there is a condensing and paring and cutting process. No excess is permitted. Only what is precise and necessary is allowed. Immediately, we notice the absence of the words “robs” and “theft,” but what does that signify?

Let us proceed to the heart of the procedure. What has been removed is the interpretation of the images. In version one, we associate the young woman’s crying with the child because we are explicitly told the child has robbed her—indeed, he has committed a “theft.” The child is oblivious to the young woman because he “knows nothing.” Even the act of rubbing his nose places the child in a different world--a world of indifference. Williams tells us how to interpret what he has shown us. She is crying because the child has robbed her of her life, and the child could care less.

In version two, the doctor’s test results version, we are handed the images and left to interpret the facts on our own. The child’s nose is pressed to the glass this time—an image of opposition. He is not in her arms or reclining on her breast. (Such sweetness would never do.) Even though this is an image of conflict, it is not interpreted for us. There is no theft. There is no robbery. There is simply his schnoze angled against the glass. Because we are presented with two unadorned images—the weeping young woman and the child with a contrary gesture—we are left to diagnose the pairing. She weeps because she is bound to the child, and the child wants none of it. Perhaps the child too wants to be unbound.