A Sort Of A Song Comments

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless.....Nice beginning with beautiful theme. Beautiful poem.

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless.....Nice beginning with w

snake is the idealic example for wicked person!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. /// GREATLY WRITTEN YEAH; REALLY A DEPTH POEM PENNED

The poem clesrly depicts the depth of your human understanding and great skills of poetry.

A poem of great depth. Few short words daze you.

Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. - wonderful poem. Voted 10.

My favorite poem by Williams is The Red Wheelbarrow and my other favorite another short one. And I like this one which expresses his approach to poet-craft, surprises (but logically ends) with his reference to saxifrage, and is good advice for us. -GK

Uniquely build a construction for poetic beauty to be exposed by words. Super is the idea of knitting a net with brilliance and emotion together. Great indeed. Thanks to PH for putting the drop to meet our thirst. Pranab k c 03/05/2018

Wonderful imaginary. Beautiful poem.

I agree with Lantz. A brilliant write.

a revolutionary poem that sings of a new write way? .............brilliantly written.

The good doctor for our antiquated poetry ills. William Carlos Williams was (and his work remains so) a giant among giants. A Sort of a Song is sort of a prescription for what is required for a good poem. It is a sort of a sermon you might say. The opening image of the snake and the weed is generic and vaguely Biblical in reference. It does specify what kind of snake. It does not say boa constrictor and thus conjure up the lush green vegetation of humid imagination. No drily dangerous rattlesnake lurking in the rocks. Not a harmless common garter snake or even a legless lizard. In essence, the image is a throw away, without depth or a concrete connection to a physical place and time that would spark further connections in the imagination. So much more so the image of a weed. What is a weed? A weed is any plant in a place where we deem it to be unwelcome. Dr. Williams is, I believe, trying to tell us this opening image is an example of failed writing. Somewhat like the snake in the garden of eden, symbolic mostly of that which we should most avoid. Pay attention to the words. Poetry is, after all, a linguistic art. The words must be viewed as concretely as possible. They are the material of creation we hope to bring into existence. The words themselves have a materiality, a sound and a form on the page, that conveys meaning even beyond the abstract intellectual sense of the words. Their generic meaning. Pay attention to rhyme and rhythm, fricatives and sybilants, even to the way the letters lay on the page above or below the line, round or angular. All these factors affect or perception of meaning. Then, magically, mysteriously, with a leap into the middle of the meat of a poem, discover metaphor. See how he finishes his first idea with a period but leaps into his next thought with a dash, it starts without his even being ready for it. This is the step that transforms the hard materia poetica into something ethereal and aesthetic. It is the reconciliation of what is with what it is in the mind. The poem is composed. It is composed both in Wordsworth's sense of emotions recollected in tranquility as well as the idea of arranging things to create an aesthetic combination worthy of artistic representation. You must take what is there, the things, and find their proper fit in the poem. No ideas but in things. Compose reality to reveal the ideas. Show, don't tell. Those things we pick to include in a composition bring emotional weight with them. Choose carefully. Pay attention to the world around you and how you invest in it the emotions and ideas that are within you. But neither forget to Invent! Those investments are one form of invention. But also bring disparate objects, things, together in your images. Invent new compositions. Thermonuclear smartphones! The everyday and the extraordinary can coexist to brilliant new ends in art. In poetry. In a delicate flower, an intrinsic idea of fragility and transient beauty, that splits the rock. The immovable, unemotional, stable inflexible objectivity. Sit at the feet of the good doctor and breathe in his healing wisdom.

Sleepless! ! Thanks for sharing this poem with us.

Slow and quick..... thanks for posting......

The first half of this poem seems to be about words themselves, explained metaphorically with the snake. Williams is expressing his desire to see a new sort of language emerge in poetry, a language that is just as accurate, effective, (sharp to strike) and determined (quiet to wait, / sleepless) as a serpent hunting its prey. But furthermore, especially in the second stanza, Williams seems to be referring to a sort of lingual existentialism: no ideas but in things is the most famous line from this poem for a reason. With this simple phrase, Williams beautifully reiterates the entire basis of existentialism: there is no essence without there first being existence (that is, there are no ideas of things without the things themselves existing first) . This is why the people and the stones must be reconciled. Not only the philosophy, but the LANGUAGE of our times as well, has apparently been corrupted by the illusion of an essence. According to Williams, a person can never be just a person - instead, he will always be himself, a singularity, an existence who will always prove more beautiful than the idea of a person (that is, any person) . Interestingly, Williams understands literature as a way of expressing singularity, a way of illustrating existence itself (by no means a simple individuality, which always expresses itself in the form of lonely predicates, or in other words the very ideas to which Williams refers) , hence his poems' frequent use of detailed of imagery. The final line is a metaphor that concludes the poem perfectly: his vibrant saxifrage will subvert and split all of the supposed concreteness and coldness of modern language. -Max A.

The first half of this poem seems to be about words themselves, explained metaphorically with the snake. Williams is expressing his desire to see a new sort of language emerge in poetry, a language that is just as accurate, effective, (sharp to strike) and determined (quiet to wait, / sleepless) as a serpent hunting its prey. But furthermore, especially in the second stanza, Williams seems to be referring to a sort of lingual existentialism: no ideas but in things is the most famous line from this poem for a reason. With this simple phrase, Williams beautifully reiterates the entire basis of existentialism: there is no essence without there first being existence (that is, there are no ideas of things without the things themselves existing first) . This is why the people and the stones must be reconciled. Not only the philosophy, but the LANGUAGE of our times as well, has apparently been corrupted by the illusion of an essence. According to Williams, a person can never be just a person - instead, he will always be himself, a singularity, an existence who will always prove more beautiful than the idea of a person (that is, any person) . Interestingly, Williams understands literature as a way of expressing singularity, a way of illustrating existence itself (by no means a simple individuality, which always expresses itself in the form of lonely predicates, or in other words the very ideas to which Williams refers) , hence his poems' frequent use of detailed of imagery. The final line is a metaphor that concludes the poem perfectly: his vibrant saxifrage will subvert and split all of the supposed concreteness and coldness of modern language. -Max A.

if you try to give a lesson, do it by an example. there's no better way to show how to do things than by showing it really... the first image of this poem seems to be some sort of denial of a previous example, as there is a piece of a advice that tells the reader to 'let the snake wait under his weed', as though it were something bad to disturbd the snake, and, what does the snake remind us of? treachery, death, perhaps, hypocrisy... 'let the snake wait under his weed' and make the flower break the stone, as though you wanted to penetrate a heart, as though you wanted to maculate the sun, with a word...

I have to say that this poem truly sucks

Even the best poets only really hit the mark perhaps one time in five. This is one of those times.