The Descent of Winter

In 1927 William Carlos Williams wrote a series of poems titled The Descent of Winter.  Each of the twenty included in Collected Early Poems was dated rather than titled, running from 10/29 to 12/15 of that year.  It’s an odd collection with only three of these pieces selected by Williams and Randal Jarrell for his Selected Poems, but there are quite a few in it that I like. 

Here’s one:

10/28

In this strong light

the leafless beechtree

shines like a cloud

it seems to glow

of itself

with a soft stript light

of love

over the brittle

grass

But there are

on second look

a few yellow leaves

still shaking

far apart

just one here one there

trembling vividly

And then there’s this one:

11/7

We must listen.  Before

she died she told them—

I always liked to be well dressed

I wanted to look nice—

So she asked them to dress

her well.  They curled her hair . . .

Now she fought

She didn’t want to go

She didn’t want to!

Or this:

11/20

Even idiots grow old

   in a cap with a peak

over his right ear

   cross-eyed

shamble-footed

   minding the three goats

behind the firehouse

   his face is deeper lined

than last year

   and the rain comes down

in gusts suddenly

I had actually been planning a post about the approach of winter, its onset, how it looks and feels, the leaves on the wet ground, brightness of grass, the ponds overflowing (as someone said recently, “The ponds are always full when they freeze”), and the yellow needles showing up on the tamaracks. 

However, I kept thinking of Williams’ title, the notion that we were on the descent into another season, and when I got to the poems themselves decided that they should stand on their own.  After all, we don’t need reminders of the seasonal change that is coming.  Winter does always find us.