William Carlos WIlliam's - The Yachts

5 Pages 1354 Words

Williams’ jams of enjambments and free verse

Williams' use of imagery encourages attentiveness to imagination. In "The Yachts," he incites the creation of images in the mind, within a chaotic maelstrom of misery, "It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;/the whole sea becomes an entanglement of watery bodies…'' (27-29) “The Yachts” lacks the traditional meter, but still conveys a sense of rhythm. The rhythm is subtle, yet influential; it exists but is essentially invisible to the reader. The dynamic visual and auditory rhythm in the poem parallels the power of its imagery. Williams succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary through the clarity and directness of imagery through slight rhythm and form.
“…Broken/beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up/they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising/in waves skill as the skillful yachts pass over.” (30-33) It is with Williams’ use of massive enjambments and lack of punctuation that allows the reader to become enraptured in a world of conflicting social classes without interruption and enables the reader to read with the conviction of the cruelty of the ‘dog eat dog’ world.
“contend in a sea which the land partly encloses/shielding them from the too-heavy blows/of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses/tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows/ to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.” (1-5)
The first letter beginning the powerful sequence of tercets is oddly lowercased. Because the capitalization of the “c” would aid in a sense of authority, Williams utilizes the lowercased “c” to give way to the feeling that his theme of class struggle plagues not the ones who yield the clout, but the majority, who wields exertion. This is seen a...