Small Poem Review: William Carlos Williams’ “ Nantucket”

Nantucket 

by William Carlos Williams

Flowers through the window

lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains –

Smell of cleanliness –

Sunshine of late afternoon –

On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler

turned down, by which

a key is lying – And the

immaculate white bed

This is another small poem that acts as a touchstone for me. Formed in Imagism, it leans into Objectivism, that is to say, a creation in the consciousness. As if one were challenged to describe a memory and strip away the emotion, Williams creates a Nantucket for the reader. This poem could have been titled “New York,” “Key West” or “Vienna,” because there’s nothing present in the quiet and clean images that fundamentally belongs to “Nantucket,” outside of it being the author’s go-to vacation site. By virtue of the images, we are given a quiet composition, a “clean” portrait of a space that one is welcome to. And, perhaps more than “The Red Wheelbarrow,” with it’s tantalizing “so much depends/upon” Here, nothing is left to chance. We are given the colors, “lavender,” “yellow,” and “white” and sunshine, as well as “glass.” This is not austerity, but cleanliness. We have ‘White” repeated twice, with curtains and presumably bedsheets. We have cleanliness and the life of a plant.  And while some might suggest that this is stripped of sentimentality, I return to this poem as a way of clarifying sentiment, of reworking sentiment into poetry. One presumes Williams is on vacation and this is his way of expressing his pleasure at his trip. He locks in the details of the room and, through the specificity, a reader gets an experience of that trip, without maudlin exposition.  The window, the key, the bed, the glass—they aren't hiding anything. By stripping away the metaphorical baggage and just showing them exactly as they are, Williams gives them more weight. The intimacy and the mood of the room aren't forced on you; they just naturally surface because the description is so sharp.  The reader can imbue the poem with its own meaning and the poem can stay in its own space, and both can go their own way without infecting one another. The signal remains and the signifier remains undestroyed.