first response to william carlos williams's
"Lear"

Williams's poem "Lear" is about inevitable and natural conflict, and the realization of that fact. Williams uses some of his favorite motifs in this conflict, such as nature, dreams, women, ships, and trees, each with a Taoist relationship to an opposite. He also relies heavily upon the poem's namesake, Shakespeare's beleaguered King Lear, who finds redemption only in death to the tragedy and false realizations that torment him. The poem's theme is semi-defeatist, with the poet's recognition that some things man can not control, and we should be comforted by the rage at which man strains these limits.

Trees play an important role in much of Williams's work and life. Williams's son, William Eric Williams, relates in his "Cars" that his father would often stop and ask the owners of trees that he particularly liked if he could have the tree, and if so, Williams was always ready to take the tree home and plant it in his own yard. A shovel and burlap bag, and wet newspaper were considered standards in the trunk of the car (Wallace 22). These trees provided Williams with a connection to nature, and he not only marveled their beauty, but would smell and taste the trees, as if trying to divine the core of their natural existence. The trees in "Lear" are analogous to the poet's conscience. Both are battered by a storm, whether physical or not, and Williams makes a clear analogy to the loss of a tree's leaves in a tempest to the loss of conscience of a man -- dormant for winter, or for night: "when the few last yellow leaves / stand out like flags on tossed ships / at anchor -- our minds are rested" (Baym 1829).

The role of women, both to man, in Williams's own view, and in their role in mankind, is very interesting, and another display of the contrapositioned forces -- the Yin of the Yin and Yang. In the first stanza, "our brittle consciences" are compared to "ships, female to all seas" (ibid.). Williams expands upon this in the last stanza: "as on ships / facing the seas were carried once / the figures of women at repose to / signify the strength of the waves' lash" (ibid.). It seems that Williams envies ships and their sailors, for they have already figured out what it took a lifetime for Shakespeare's King Lear to master. The "women at repose" signify, for the sailors, that they recognize their puniness to the sea and to nature, and do not try to tempt its power.

This Yin Yang relationship between the ship and the sea is taken even further by Williams when he compares the condition of mankind to Wife of the storm, which is the personification of nature. But mankind's self-established impunity hinders him from the real truth: "Wife to its power might you not / better have yielded sooner?" Most of the fixtures of the poem seem to be in this same sort of Yin Yang contrast - the King to the Fool, the unmentioned Husband to Wife, the ship to the sea, the conscience to the dream, the solid to the apparition, and the dry to the drenched, and the quiet to the fury.

The use of Shakespeare's Lear is used in two effects. The first, is as a human caught in the greater part of nature. Here, Lear symbolizes the lesser of two physical forces, one of nature, and one of man. But, it is hard to say whether Shakespeare himself wanted his play King Lear to be about man's struggle with the forces of external nature, such as a tempest, or the Cliffs of Dover, or rather he meant for the play to focus on the mental workings of Lear himself, and his own internal psychological battle. Nahum Tate, the first to really rework King Lear in 1681, belonged to the latter school, and made the social interactions of Lear merely a family dispute, and internalized much of the strife and suffering of Lear in to his own mind and heart. Yet this century has put much more favor to the former, making the play much more bleak, and full of despair. R. A. Foakes, writing about the King Lear adaptations of the twentieth century, asserts that, "If any affirmation was to be found, it was a limited one in the face of 'that universal disruption of Nature, the Descent into Chaos, which for millennia had been a standing dread of mankind.'" (Foakes 83). Williams seems to straddle the fence quite well in his poem. First, we are set "in our dreams, walking / at a loss through bulks of figures / that appeared solid, men or women." (Baym 1829) By the end of the poem, Williams chides Lear that "not even you could /outshout the storm -- to make a fool / cry!" (ibid.) Clearly, the storm he refers to is that of the world and nature from the first line.

What Williams stresses in "Lear" is not really the conflict though, it is the resolution and acceptance of fate. Just as King Lear found a redemption of his patriarchal sins in death, so the poet seems to find solstace in sleep -- in the breaking of his own "brittle conscience." To "yield" and to be made "quiet by its fury" (ibid.) seems to be the lesson of this exercise. Just as ships know and do, it is better for man to carry a token of homage to the forces that still control man's delicate skeleton and spirit.