At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
2 comments:
The criticism is of course fair enough, and would be brave and original as well, if delivered a hundred years ago.
The sexual charge in all Williams' poetry more or less "asks for it".
Still, this little 1916 poem has, if we may dare to use the term, "engendered" more oceans of cheap gendered critique than it probably earns.
I mean, without ponderous essays deconstructing such relatively innocuous specimens of brutal male transgression, where would sentences like this one go to find a home?
"This polemical concept of gaze, itself the product of the hyperbrave binarist stage of gynocritical thought, may have serious uses for the analysis of lyric poetry in helping to identify elements of the diegetic relations depicted..."
Well, to academic conferences I guess.
The comic attack is at once equally unfair, and much more telling, and (bonus) you don't even have to be wearing a long black coat and frowning in order to enjoy it.
YOU ASKED FOR IT
Forgive me as I stand
Over this sexually
Charged word
Monger’s ware
And ogle it.
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