Berket And The Stars - Analysis

Introduction and Impression

This poem reads like a compressed anecdote: lively, amused, and slightly ironic. The tone starts exuberant—“A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of student poverty!”—and finishes wryly celebratory as the petty theft becomes a family legend. There is a quick mood shift from immediate physical action to retrospective, almost mythic commentary.

Contextual Resonances

William Carlos Williams often focused on everyday American scenes and common speech, and this short piece fits that impulse: a small urban moment, an act by a student named Berket, and the casual transformation of that act into lore. The speaker’s attention to ordinary detail and local color reflects Williams’s broader modernist project of finding significance in the quotidian.

Theme: Poverty, Pleasure, and Ethics

The poem frames the event as a rare, precious relief from material lack—“one best day out of ten good ones.” The act of taking an orange is both want-driven and celebratory: Berket is “in high spirits.” Williams neither condemns nor condones explicitly; instead he emphasizes circumstance and feeling, inviting readers to weigh the small moral ambiguity against the hunger and joy motivating it.

Theme: Storytelling and Embellishment

The closing lines turn a single streetwise deception into multi-generational rumor: “the rumor of the thing has come down through / three generations.” This theme shows how ordinary acts are amplified by retelling, gaining mythic proportions (“which is relatively forever!”). The poem comments on how communal memory reshapes fact into legend.

Imagery and Symbol: The Orange and the Wave

The orange functions as a simple but potent symbol of desire, sustenance, and small luxury. The image of the vendor’s cart grounds the scene. The unusual metaphor—“the full sweep of certain wave summits”—casts the theft as an artful, almost natural movement, suggesting agility and timing rather than brute wrongdoing. Together these images make the theft aesthetic and inevitable rather than purely criminal.

Concluding Insight

Williams compresses social observation, character, and commentary into a compact anecdote that celebrates ordinary human impulsiveness and the way small acts become communal story. The poem’s significance lies less in moral judgment than in its affectionate attention to how a fleeting moment can be transformed into enduring narrative.