19 pages • 38 minutes read
To Waken An Old Lady
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Literary Devices
Form & Meter
“To Waken an Old Lady” is composed of 18 lines of verse not conforming to any metrical or syllabic pattern. As is often true of William Carlos Williams poems, the lines which comprise the poem are very small in length, ranging from two to six syllables in length and averaging somewhere around three or four syllables. Williams’s lines are not end-rhymed, nor do they employ much internal rhyme. Instead, Williams’s diction is minimal, vivid, clear, and precise. The poem is not divided into stanzas, but instead is made up of a single unbroken block of lineated text.
Some lines do utilize metrical effects to create musicality. For example, the couplet “Gaining and failing / they are buffeted” (Lines 7-8) is composed of lines which precisely echo one another’s meter. Each line is made up of one dactyl (or poetic foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) and a following trochee (or poetic foot made up of an initial stressed syllable finished by an unstressed syllable). The rhythm is clearly audible, with “GAINing and” echoing “THEY are buff” [emphasis added] (Lines 7-8) addended with their following “FAILing” and “FETed” [emphasis added] (Lines 7-8) clearly aligning with similar metrical structures. While Williams’s use of meter is sporadic, moments like this work to create sonic cohesion in an otherwise minimal poem.
Pataphor
While William Carlos Williams would not have been familiar with the term “pataphor,” a relatively new term for a literary device that traces its roots back to the 19th-century French proto-Surrealist writer Alfred Jarry, his poem “To Waken an Old Lady” nonetheless employs pataphoric strategies. While metaphor uses imagistic language to create a figurative reality beyond the one it initially describes, pataphor attempts to abstract one level further. A metaphor consists of two parts, the vehicle and the tenor. In the metaphoric connection Williams makes in the poem, “Old age” (Line 1) is the tenor (the thing described) and the flock of birds is the vehicle (the image used to describe the tenor). A pataphor occurs when the hypothetical reality created by the vehicle of the metaphor grows beyond its boundaries. While this imagistic world exists purely to serve the tenor in a traditional metaphor, it becomes its own world disconnected from the tenor in a pataphor.
In “To Waken an Old Lady,” there is a marked inequality in the amount of the text devoted to the tenor and the amount devoted to the vehicle. The tenor the metaphor is confined to the first line “Old age is” (Line 1), while the remaining 17 lines communicate the vehicular image. While the image mostly serves the tenor, with the flock and the elements all communicating things about the nature of old age, there are times where the image becomes concerned only with itself. While the vulnerability, collectivity, and resiliency of the “flight of small / […] birds” (Lines 2-3) all represent some element of old age—and the “harsh” (Line 11) conditions of winter communicate mortality—Williams evokes details of the image-world of the birds which exceed any relationship to old age. When the flock flies, “cheeping” (Line 3), “skimming / bare trees / above a snow glaze” (Lines 4-6), they are inhabiting a detailed and sensuous world that (in the poem) exists in its own right, outside of its service to metaphor. These details, which give life to an image beyond its use as comparative language, exemplify the poem’s spilling over of metaphor into the realm of pataphor.
Enjambment
A line of verse is enjambed when it is broken against the flow of syntax. Some of the lines in Williams’s “To Waken an Old Lady” are parsed with the syntax and, thus, broken in traditional ways: “above a snow glaze” (Line 6) and “piping of plenty” end on periods, “But what?” on a question mark (Line 10), “dark wind—” (Line 9) and “flock has rested—” on em-dashes (Line 12), and “seedhusks” (Line 15) breaks before a conjunction. However, almost the entire remainder of the text’s poetic lines break against the syntax.
Williams uses this enjambment for a variety of purposes, not the least of which is creating subtle alternate reads which work to season the primary grammatical meanings of the poem. For example, the enjambed second line “a flight of small” (Line 2) emphasizes the defenselessness of a small size without yet providing a concrete object for the adjective to modify. Lines like “covered with broken” (Line 14) take advantage of this same feature of enjambed line, emphasizing an adjective without yet a noun for it to modify.
Because the majority of Williams’s very short lines are enjambed, the poem can appear to have a choppy or disjointed rhythm. After all, the reader is constantly interrupted in the middle of a phrase during the process of reading. However, “To Waken an Old Lady,” like many of Williams’s poems, is composed of clear and precise diction in variable feet, leading to a measured and conversational feel. Williams’s short, enjambed lines play against this, then, cutting it up into small pieces which force the reader to approach everyday language in terms of its beautiful and distinct parts.
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By William Carlos Williams
