It Is A Living Coral - Analysis

Introduction

The poem reads as a brisk, fragmented survey of American public art and historical memory, with a tone that moves between ironic detachment and incredulous amusement. Repetitions and sudden name-drops create a sense of overload and collage, while the closing image of the dead "sickly green" undercuts heroic display with morbidity. The mood shifts from civic pomp to satirical exposure of art's inability to contain history's contradictions.

Historical and biographical context

William Carlos Williams, an American modernist and physician, often attended to the ordinary and local while critiquing national myths. This piece engages with late 19th- and early 20th-century monumental civic sculpture and the rhetoric of "E Pluribus Unum," suggesting skepticism about grand, official narratives and the physical edifices that attempt to embody them.

Theme: Public memory versus reality

The poem juxtaposes patriotic symbols—the "Capitol," "Armed Liberty," "Mars," "Washington"—with jarring details that puncture solemnity: a "little card / hanging" identifying figures, or "Frances / Willard’s corset is / absurd." These images imply that public memory is staged and labeled, even ridiculous, and that monuments simplify, misrepresent, or sanitize complex events.

Theme: The artifice of representation

Lines describing iron plates "constructed / to expand / and contract" and the "folding / and unfolding of a lily" highlight mechanical artifice alongside natural metaphor, suggesting sculpture is both engineered and performative. The poem's catalogue of sculptors and subjects—Trumbull, Varnum, Perry—reads like a museum label roll call, emphasizing how representation flattens lived experience into names and poses.

Theme: Violence and erasure

Amid civic fanfare, violent actions recur: "Indian burning arrows," "to fire / her mansion," "the dead / among the wreckage." These intrusions reveal the human cost behind heroic tableaux and suggest that monuments may celebrate conquest while effacing suffering, literally relegating the dead to a "sickly green" background.

Imagery and recurring symbols

The dome, wreaths, laurel, and armored figures function as symbols of authority and triumph, yet Williams frequently undercuts them with small, almost comic details—a "little card" or "corset"—that demystify grandeur. Water imagery (an "island," "river," "rowboat on Lake / Erie") and the persistent references to materiality (iron plates, weight) tie together themes of instability and heavy, constructed remembrance. One might ask whether the "scaleless / jumble" is an indictment of national self-image or of the aesthetic programs that support it.

Conclusion

Williams's poem renders American civic art as a crowded, sometimes absurd theater where official story-telling collides with material awkwardness and historical violence. Its fragmented listing and tonal shifts force the reader to see monuments not as unified truths but as contested constructions that both reveal and conceal the past.