William Carlos Williams 'The Great Figure'
The importance of a poem does not always come in its meaning. William Carlos Williams illustrates this in his work, “The Great Figure.” Being an extremely short story about a man seeing a fire truck speed past him on a gloomy night, the actual story leaves readers searching for more. Acting almost as a piece of rebellion against more traditional poetry, Williams is able to take the focus away from the physical meaning of the poem and make readers focus on the careful structural choices he made. The answer to the longing that readers experience is found in analysis of these choices. Through freedom of meter, language specifically focused on conveying vibrant images, and difficult to find moods, Williams is able to affect the reader much more
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Being written in free verse, the poem is not held to patterns and meter that comes with other types of poetry. The center of the poem is made up of four lines comprised of just one word each: “firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded” (6-9). By breaking the sentence up in this way, the reader is forced to take pauses between every line, even though grammatically, the sentence should be read as one continuous idea without pause. This freedom of structure allows for Williams to draw out the poem, made up of only one sentence, as long as he needs to by having the majority of lines be only one or two words. Thereby, the thought gets stretched out much longer than it really should, much like the moment that the poem was written about; the fire truck driving down the street had enough effect on the narrator that it transcended the short time it actually …show more content…
However, where the poem does choose to focus its efforts is imagery. Following the Imagist movement, Williams favored sharp language void of needless words that conveyed detailed and vibrant images. “Among the rain / and lights” (1-2), we can clearly see the great figure that the title of the poem is referring to: “the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck” (3-6). We can also see the person standing alone in “the dark city” (13). So clear is this “figure 5” that the artist Charles Demuth made a painting entitled I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, putting the main images from the poem into a physical painting. The painting depicts a golden 5 on top of a background of unruly reds, blues, and whites symbolizing the fire truck, the dark city, and the lights lining the city streets. This painting allows for us to be brought into the speaker’s memory of the fire truck, which is the entire basis of this poem. In addition to the images painted in the language of the poem, the physical shape made by the words’ positioning takes up a lot of space, much like the fire truck in the physical moment and in the memory of our speaker; he cannot get this fire truck out of his
Being written in free verse, the poem is not held to patterns and meter that comes with other types of poetry. The center of the poem is made up of four lines comprised of just one word each: “firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded” (6-9). By breaking the sentence up in this way, the reader is forced to take pauses between every line, even though grammatically, the sentence should be read as one continuous idea without pause. This freedom of structure allows for Williams to draw out the poem, made up of only one sentence, as long as he needs to by having the majority of lines be only one or two words. Thereby, the thought gets stretched out much longer than it really should, much like the moment that the poem was written about; the fire truck driving down the street had enough effect on the narrator that it transcended the short time it actually …show more content…
However, where the poem does choose to focus its efforts is imagery. Following the Imagist movement, Williams favored sharp language void of needless words that conveyed detailed and vibrant images. “Among the rain / and lights” (1-2), we can clearly see the great figure that the title of the poem is referring to: “the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck” (3-6). We can also see the person standing alone in “the dark city” (13). So clear is this “figure 5” that the artist Charles Demuth made a painting entitled I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, putting the main images from the poem into a physical painting. The painting depicts a golden 5 on top of a background of unruly reds, blues, and whites symbolizing the fire truck, the dark city, and the lights lining the city streets. This painting allows for us to be brought into the speaker’s memory of the fire truck, which is the entire basis of this poem. In addition to the images painted in the language of the poem, the physical shape made by the words’ positioning takes up a lot of space, much like the fire truck in the physical moment and in the memory of our speaker; he cannot get this fire truck out of his