WCW

Just reading through my copy of "The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams," and ran across this one:



The New Cathedral Overlooking the Park

The new cathedral overlooking the park
looked down from its tower
with great eyes today and saw
by the decorative lake a group of people
staring curiously at the corpse
of a suicide - Peaceful dead young man
the money they have put into the stones
has been spent to teach men of
life's austerity. You died
and teach us the same lesson.
You seem a cathedral, celebrant of
the naked spring that shivers for me
among the long black trees



The first time I read through this I saw the suicide as a jump from the top of the actual cathedral. Re-reading it, that doesn't seem valid any more. But I like the idea anyway. The metaphor of the suicide as a cathedral obviously has troubling religious overtones - and the naked spring and the long black trees seem a reference to the Waste Land-infused society at the time (1923).

Maybe the members of such a communication-poor society had to make an essential choice: be the onlookers, the detached impersonal "group of people / staring curiously," and have absolutely no understanding of the naked spring shivering around you or the eyes of the cathedral looking down at you; be the stoically and blinder-wearing religious men who build the cathedral, trying to teach humanity something abstractly and finding your relationships only with dead stones or an imagined God (one which may not be so imagined, since he may be the identity in the poem observing the scene); or be the suicide, the bearer of a lesson more vivid and horrible and visceral than an actual cathedral could ever be (and perhaps achieve true communication). But has the suicide actually communicated anything, or was it in vain? Who is the poet that understands the "peaceful dead young man['s]" intentions?

The "decorative lake" makes everything that follows seem even more unnecessarily tragic.