The Comparison of a Woman to a Flower
The essence of one flower’s beauty is enough to take one’s breath away. Many can bring about a feeling of exhilaration and awe. Henry Beecher once stated that, “flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.” Many humans thrive on the very existence of a flower without any awareness as to whether or not it has humanlike characteristics or traits. The symbolic view of flowers is displayed in an obvious manner in many of William Carlos Williams’ poems. His works were open to many avenues and seemed to be limited to none. Williams emphasized that a poem must have its own idiom in dealing with “those things that lie under the scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose” (285). Williams’ poems portray numerous amounts of themes that center around a wide range of portraits of individual women. More often than not, his idea of a woman is represented as a flower. Although a woman is made of many parts that a flower does not contain, Williams still manages to illustrate the concept of body and soul as a flower. A piece of work written by Williams that compares the female to a flower can be seen in “The Young Housewife.” The speaker of the poem informs the reader of what meets his eye while passing a house one early morning. He observes a woman who is “in negligee/behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house” (2-3). The statement made about this being her husband’s house shows his dominative grasp on her. It appears that the husband has the woman in a captive state behind the walls of this house. She desires to be free from his power of restraint. In a sense, the poet feels compassion and understanding for the woman because he “bows and passes smiling,” (12). The idea behind this woman’s lack of freedom is not evident in the poem; however, it may lie behind the notion that her husband is abusive, overbearing, or she may just simply be unhappy. She has to be tended to and taken care of just like a flower. A flower can be
Cited: Quotations About Flowers. Welcome to the Quote Garden. Quote Garden Corporation. N.d. 2 Apr. 2011. Ramazani, Jahan et. el., eds. “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2003. Ramazani, Jahan et.el., eds. “Queen Anne’s Lace.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2003. Ramazani, Jahan et.el., eds. “The Young Housewife.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2003. Verdier, Douglas L. “Williams’ Queen Anne’s Lace.” The Explicator 40.1 (Fall 1981): 46-47. Rpt. in Poetry for Students. Ed. Mary K. Ruby. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Apr. 2011.