Williams: ‘The Great Figure’

 William Carlos Williams’s “The Great Figure” seems like a pivotal poem.

Williams perfected a kind of poem that involves a single image, so vivid you can see it, touch it and sometimes smell it.

People who read poetry know some of his images: a red wheelbarrow, a tidy room in Nantucket with lavender and yellow flowers through the window, some chilled plums in the icebox.

But those images came a bit later.

“The Great Figure” is a numeral, No. 5, painted on a firetruck

 

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls. …

 

Williams’s friend Charles Demuth was so taken by the image of a firetruck running through an urban canyon at night that he painted it. “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold” is in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Scholars say Williams’s poetry took a turn toward the vivid image, the concret object earlier. But “The Great Figure” appeared in Sour Grapes, published in 1921. It’s the first poem I have found where an image jumps out at me. I could see it. It raised an image in my mind, just as it raised a far more famous image in Demuth’s.

Some of Williams’s earlier poems are interesting. I think “Tract,” published in 1917 in Al Que Quiere!, is his first great poem. But for me, Williams found something wonderful when watched a big machine racing through the dark and thought to make note of a single — perhaps a minor — detail.

• Sources: You can find “The Great Figure” at Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51549/the-great-figure

But I’d recommend reading it here: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985. That edition has been mind-expanding. Poems mentioned in this note include “The Great Figure,” p. 36, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” p. 56, “Nantucket,” p. 72, “This Is Just to Say,” p. 74, and “Tract,” pp. 18-20.