Queen-Anne’s Lace

There's something tremendously Otherworldly about the 1921 sonnet "Sovereign Anne's Trim," by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), whose September 17 birthday we remember today. That is, for all its pioneer characteristics — its eschewal of ordinary examples of rhyme and meter, its height of picture as thought — the manner in which the sonnet utilizes its focal picture is exactly the way the seventeenth-century Supernatural artists (John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Co.) called pictures into play.

Take for instance the most popular sonnet of the American Puritan writer Edward Taylor (1642-1729), a second-age Powerful brought into the world in Britain minimal over 10 years after the passings of his harbingers Donne (1572-1631) and Herbert (1593-1633), however relocated in 1668 to American soil. His sonnet "Huswifery" takes for its arrogance, or focal analogy, the course of material making.

The sonnet consumes large numbers of its eighteen lines in naming the parts and activities of a turning haggle loom. God is the "housewife" who works at turning and winding to dress a spirit in the sublime robes of honorableness. As perusers, we never neglect to focus on the turning haggle as exacting items. The profound course of blessing is grounded in the materiality of these things. We comprehend them in their thing-ness, even as we comprehend that the sonnet truly isn't tied in with making material by any means.

This merits holding at the top of the priority list while perusing William Carlos Williams. "Sovereign Anne's Ribbon" feels like a reaction to that early American sonnet. Like Robert Ice and others of his age who had sat (allegorically) at the feet of the incomparable English artists, Williams was "looking," as the contemporary writer Paul Mariani (b. 1940) puts it, "for an unmistakable American language," that would do what extraordinary verse did, however in modes fit to the turbulent energy of mid twentieth century America, with its specific scenes and its particular delights.

Thus we have a sonnet whose focal vanity is a typical weed: Sovereign Anne's Trim, a wild carrot that got away from frontier transfers of European beginning, blossoming today in sensitive bounty across every one of the mild zones of America.

The sonnet clarifies from its most memorable line, as Taylor's "Huswifery" does, that a drawn out similitude is going to result. "Her body isn't so white as," it starts — not so particularly white as the petals of the anemone, which is as a matter of fact the blossom with the "purple mole at its middle," like a flaw where too-sensitive skin has been contacted.

Dissimilar to the anemone, Sovereign Anne's Trim isn't "remote" or delicate, however reprobate. It spreads all over, "taking the field forcibly" and muffling the grass. At the point when contacted, this lady's body, which resembles that degenerate wild carrot, doesn't flaw, however "blooms." Want, similar to the wildflower, duplicates itself until the body, similar to the field, is consumed by it. This may be its own sort of immaculateness: "a devout wish to whiteness gone over."

Or on the other hand perhaps it amounts to nothing. In its last line, amazingly, Williams' Magical sonnet appears to dismiss mysticism. The picture implies just itself. It suggests no higher reality. What it does is just the naturally resolved activity of its sort. Like the body for which it fills in as a similitude, the blossom, eventually, is a main a bloom, something material, strict and flippant.