Great Mullen - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem reads as a brisk, confrontational monologue in which a speaker addresses a mullein plant with volatile mixture of contempt, desire and jealousy. The tone shifts rapidly between mockery, accusation and an almost worshipful admiration, producing a restless, intimate energy. The voice feels colloquial and immediate, alternating between vivid insults and sudden tenderness.

Context and authorial background

William Carlos Williams, an American modernist poet and physician, often focused on concrete, local images and everyday language to reveal deeper emotional states. Knowing Williams’s interest in close observation and domestic details helps explain the poem’s attention to plant anatomy and bodily imagery as vehicles for human feeling.

Theme: Desire, jealousy and projection

The poem projects human sexual rivalry onto plants: the speaker accuses the mullein of coming "from her" and carrying scent ("I can smell djer-kiss on your clothes"), suggesting erotic jealousy. The repeated "Liar" and assertions that "She has defiled ME" make desire and perceived betrayal central. Vivid sensory detail (smell, heat, touch) animates the emotional stakes.

Theme: Smallness and potency of identity

The speaker repeatedly contrasts scale and position: he is "a point of dew on a grass-stem" or "a cricket waving his antennae," while the mullein is "high, grey and straight" and "a mast with a lantern." These images explore how a modest, vulnerable self reacts to an imposing rival, mixing inferiority with defiant dignity in lines like "I love you, straight, yellow / finger of God."

Symbolic imagery and recurring motifs

The mullein itself is a complex symbol: as "yellow," "straight," and "a mast with a lantern" it evokes guidance, phallic presence and spiritual light; yet the speaker also calls it "cowdung," "dungcake" and "birdlime," images of baseness and clinging. This doubleness suggests simultaneous attraction and contempt. Recurrent bodily and agricultural images (dung, bark, hairs, dew) ground the poem in earthy physicality while carrying moral and erotic associations.

Ambiguity and a provocative question

The poem leaves unresolved whether the speaker’s accusations are literal or projection of inner turmoil: is the mullein truly allied with "her," or is it a focal point for the speaker’s jealousy? That ambiguity invites the question: does the poem expose social betrayal or the speaker’s own inability to accept difference and distance?

Concluding insight

By turning a simple plant into a charged interlocutor, Williams compresses erotic rivalry, self-recrimination and religious awe into sharp, tactile images. The poem’s energy comes from the collision of low and luminous metaphors and a voice that refuses a single stance, making the mullein a mirror for human contradictions.