The content of this poem is just as significant as its form. Williams makes art historical analysis his subject. He looks over the whole poem explaining the pertinent details and compositional arrangements. This practice really highlights the flow between words and pictures. The reader can either read the poem first and then look at the painting, look at the painting and then read the poem, or even simultaneously look at the painting and read the poem. Each one of those options creates a different, but meaningful effect on the reader. If you were to read the poem then look at the painting, the reader would have Williams’ explanation in their mind while forming their own explanations of the work. Conversely, if a viewer looks at the painting
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He starts off very generally, by pretty much just stating the obvious. As the title suggests, and what one quick glance yields, this is a snow covered scene. Williams’ absence of punctuation and heavy use of enjambment makes his observations flow together, sometimes in a confusing manner. The first line stands alone, but the short second one continues onto the third. The “in the background” belongs with the icy mountains because they are in the back of the composition. However, it is in the same line of thought with “the return // from the hunt is toward evening.” This makes it seem like the returning hunters are in the background, even though they are clearly in the foreground and the focus of the painting. The line toward evening is interesting because, it looks like daytime. The sky is a muddled blue, blue and there are no lights in the window. Realistically, this would be when the hunters return, but there are not too many visual cues to support this. Williams also begins the second stanza with a preposition, which he is quite fond of doing. This technique puts the reader right among the …show more content…
When he was asked if painters spoke the same language as he did, Williams responded, “Yes, very close – And as I’ve grown older, I’ve attempted to fuse the poetry and painting to make it the same thing” (Dijkstra, 2-3). This was before he even wrote Sour Grapes and it was already a concern of his. Flash forward fifty years, and it is still a major concern. There are many things Williams did to try to achieve this. One of them was quite simple; he chose to either add striking visual elements to his poems or take visual works of art as his subject. “The Great Figure” makes use of description of color and motion, making the reader gain a pretty clear picture in their head. He does this in other poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “Queen-Ann’s Lace” add colorful description to his short, expressive poems that dwell on imagism. The Brueghel series takes a very important art historical source as its subject. Williams explicates the paintings, like any art historian would, except he enjambs all of the lines to make them more abstract and to invert the reader’s
He starts off very generally, by pretty much just stating the obvious. As the title suggests, and what one quick glance yields, this is a snow covered scene. Williams’ absence of punctuation and heavy use of enjambment makes his observations flow together, sometimes in a confusing manner. The first line stands alone, but the short second one continues onto the third. The “in the background” belongs with the icy mountains because they are in the back of the composition. However, it is in the same line of thought with “the return // from the hunt is toward evening.” This makes it seem like the returning hunters are in the background, even though they are clearly in the foreground and the focus of the painting. The line toward evening is interesting because, it looks like daytime. The sky is a muddled blue, blue and there are no lights in the window. Realistically, this would be when the hunters return, but there are not too many visual cues to support this. Williams also begins the second stanza with a preposition, which he is quite fond of doing. This technique puts the reader right among the …show more content…
When he was asked if painters spoke the same language as he did, Williams responded, “Yes, very close – And as I’ve grown older, I’ve attempted to fuse the poetry and painting to make it the same thing” (Dijkstra, 2-3). This was before he even wrote Sour Grapes and it was already a concern of his. Flash forward fifty years, and it is still a major concern. There are many things Williams did to try to achieve this. One of them was quite simple; he chose to either add striking visual elements to his poems or take visual works of art as his subject. “The Great Figure” makes use of description of color and motion, making the reader gain a pretty clear picture in their head. He does this in other poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “Queen-Ann’s Lace” add colorful description to his short, expressive poems that dwell on imagism. The Brueghel series takes a very important art historical source as its subject. Williams explicates the paintings, like any art historian would, except he enjambs all of the lines to make them more abstract and to invert the reader’s