Introduction xv

his “north room” and “dance naked, grotesquely / before my mirror . . . sing-
ing softly to myself, ‘I am lonely, lonely, / I was born to be lonely, / I am
best so!’ ” (Collected Poems 1 86–87). To assume, as some students did, that
Kathleen, clearly the baby’s nurse, and the poet are lovers, is to ignore the
speaker’s consuming desire to be alone, to assert his independence from the
daily household routine. On the other hand, this transient desire has its
comic side, as we know from the poem’s conclusion that even as the poet does
his eccentric little naked dance, he declares, “Who shall say I am not / the
happy genius of my household?” The poet is smiling at his own antics.
Indeed, a droll, tongue-in-cheek humor is central to these early Williams
lyrics, as their language and genre suggest. Because poetry now tends to be
taught, when taught at all, without recourse to convention and genre, readers
fail to recognize that “The Young Housewife” is to be read as an updated ver-
sion of the chanson courtois: the “solitary” physician at the wheel of his car
is a modern version of the knight on his charger, approaching the forti¤ed
castle where his lady is kept in captivity by the tyrannical lord of the manor.
The “young housewife,” pictured “behind / the wooden walls of her hus-
band’s house”—a deliciously long-winded circumlocution—is inaccessible to
the poet. But his “Complaint” is more parodic than real; he does not pene-
trate the “wooden” castle before him; indeed he merely passes by. And he will
not languish or wither away from unrequited love; on the contrary, the poem
ends with a smile. After all, as neighboring poems make clear, he has, for
better or worse, his own wife—another young housewife, incidentally, who
must negotiate with ice-men and ¤sh-men.
Given these generic markers, the poem itself is a triumph of tone. The
three-stanza free-verse poem begins matter-of-factly:

/ / /\ // / / /\
At ten A. M. the young housewife

It sounds like a lab report, but Williams slyly makes the second word group
echo the ¤rst by repeating its stress pattern in elongated form, as if to equate
the anonymous woman with a mere time signal.4 After this casual opening,
the second line deviates from the colloquial norm:

moves about in negligee behind

Normal syntax would demand an article or possessive pronoun before “neg-

ligee”; its absence suggests that “in negligee” is this young woman’s inherent
state—a supposition borne out by the curious break after “behind” that gives
us a double entendre, focusing on the woman’s “in negligee behind.” The
xvi Introduction
same phenomenon occurs in lines 7–8, where the poet, passing “solitary in
[his] car,” ¤rst surmises (or imagines) that the young housewife is “un-
corseted” and then observes her “tucking in” what the line break anticipates
will be her ®esh, deliciously not yet tucked into her corset, but that turns out
to refer to “stray ends of hair.”
With the image of those sexually charged “stray ends of hair,” the poet’s
erotic fantasy reaches its peak. Williams’s lyric form, James Breslin observed
in what is probably still the best general book on the poet, “renders prosaic
subjects with a tough colloquial ®atness.”5 But what is interesting is that this
“colloquial ®atness” so easily moves—and this is a Williams trademark—into
a quasi-surrealism, a fantasy state. The young housewife’s appearance, un-
corseted and “in negligee,” may be largely a projection of the poet’s own de-
sire. And the comparison that now follows—“and I compare her / to a fallen
leaf ”—is patently absurd, since no one could seem fresher, younger, more
shyly inexperienced than this young, probably newly married woman, per-
forming her housewifely tasks. The poet may well wish that she would come
to the curb and call out, not to the ice-man or ¤sh-man, but to him! It is only
in foolishly comparing her to a fallen leaf that he can distance himself from
her presence.
And so, in the ¤nal stanza the “noiseless wheels of [his] car / rush with a
crackling sound over / dried leaves”—a puzzle, for how do noiseless wheels
crackle? Perhaps the poet-doctor is just imagining the sound? He knows, in
any case, that normalcy must prevail, that it is 10 a.m. on an ordinary week-
day morning and probably time to make hospital rounds. The desire to “rush
with a crackling sound over / dried leaves” is thus ®eeting and subliminal, a
momentary wish to “have” what belongs to another man. But within the sub-
urban context of the poem, nothing is going to happen. The driver merely
“bow[s] and pass[es] smiling.” Time to move on.
It is only by looking closely at line breaks, syntactic units, and word order
that the delicately comic/erotic tone of “The Young Housewife” can be un-
derstood. If the poet’s is a rape fantasy, it remains ¤rmly in the poet’s mind,
the irony being that the young woman seems largely unaware of his presence.
Indeed, the poet’s self-assertion is itself comic, as in the silly internal rhyme:

Stray ends of hair, and I compare her

And this line also contains an echo of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” In the same vein, the alliteration of h’s in lines 2 and 3—“behind,”
“her,” “husband’s house”—gives the lines a breathlessness connoting antici-
pation rather than any kind of serious plot.