Asphodel That Greeny Flower - Analysis

Overall impression

Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" reads as a long, intimate confession addressed to a lifelong companion. The tone is alternately repentant, tender, celebratory and apprehensive, with shifts from memory to immediate pleading that create a sense of urgency. The poem moves from cataloged recollection to moral appeal and finally to a yearning plea for reconciliation. Its mood oscillates between nostalgic sensuality and sober ethical accounting.

Relevant context

Written late in Williams's life, the poem is shaped by failing health, personal crises, and a fraught marriage; these circumstances intensify its themes of mortality, confession and the need for forgiveness. Knowing the poem grew from a prolonged, self-examining period cast in the shadow of strokes and hospital stays helps explain its mixture of candid admission and devotional address.

Theme: Enduring love and reconciliation

The speaker repeatedly frames asphodel as a token of "abiding love" and returns to shared scenes—weddings, gardens, sea—to authenticate that bond. Images of vows, the altar, and domestic gardens function as evidence that love persisted despite failures; the repeated direct address ("my sweet," "you remember?") converts memory into an act of repair, culminating in an explicit plea for forgiveness.

Theme: Memory, loss and survival

Memory governs the poem—its structure is essentially a sequence of recollections that stand against fading color and "an odor" that revives the past. The speaker worries about forgetting yet experiences sudden sensory returns (honeysuckle, bees, pressed flowers) that revive identity and meaning; memory thus appears both fragile and redemptive.

Theme: Art, poems and moral necessity

Williams argues for the ethical power of poetry ("It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably") and positions his own poetic voice as necessary for human survival and reconciliation. The poet's confession and appeal are inseparable from the act of poetic utterance—he must "talk on / against time"—so art becomes both medium and moral instrument.

Recurring imagery and symbolism

The asphodel itself recurs as central emblem: oddly green, wooden, nearly odorless yet imagined as fragrant. It symbolizes a paradoxical love that is both humble and sacred, present in heaven and hell. Other persistent images—the sea, storms, gardens, pressed flowers—function as provinces of memory and feeling: the sea signifies vast, elemental force and mythic consequence (Iliad/Helen), the garden domestic nurture and moral cultivation, while pressed flowers suggest preservation and the partial loss of sensory life (color fades; scent lingers). The poem's repeated sensory revivals pose an open question: do these recovered scents and images restore the past or merely create a new, poetics-inflected present?

Form supporting meaning

The long, discursive free-verse addresses and repetitions mimic the workings of an aging mind recalling and pleading; the conversational cadence reinforces intimacy and immediacy more than formal architecture would, making confession feel alive and urgent.

Concluding insight

Williams's poem stages a late-life reckoning in which memory, erotic devotion and poetic speech intersect to ask for mercy and to reassert love's moral claim. The asphodel—humble, green, oddly smelling in imagination—becomes the emblem of a sustained, imperfect love that the speaker hopes both to justify and to renew through honest, vulnerable saying.