It Is A Small Plant - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem presents a sustained ekphrastic-simile that equates a woman's gaze with a small plant, creating a tone that is both observant and quietly ironic. The mood shifts from delicate botanical description to a more complex emotional register—desire, achievement, and a hint of disappointment. Williams blends clinical detail with sensual imagery, producing a compressed meditation on perception and feeling.

Authorial context

William Carlos Williams, an American modernist poet and physician, often focused on everyday objects rendered with precise, imagistic language. His clinical eye and interest in quotidian scenes inform this poem's close, almost diagnostic scrutiny of a glance rendered as flora.

Theme: Desire and its fragility

The poem develops desire through images of buds, pods, and “blue eyes / a little closed upon a wish / achieved and half lost again”, suggesting attainment that is simultaneously incomplete. The plant metaphor carries sexual and emotional longing—“a pale hollow of / desire itself”—but desire here is fragile, easily reverting to seed or stale achievement.

Theme: Perception and multiplicity

Williams emphasizes the complexity of looking: “there are twenty looks / in one” and the repeated counting—“forty times over”—suggests that a single regard contains many impressions. The poem treats the gaze as layered and repeated, not singular or transparent.

Theme: Fulfillment versus decline

Botanical cycles—pods, flowers, seed—frame a tension between fruition and decay. Phrases like “satisfaction gone to seed” and “stale achievement” imply that fulfillment can quickly become diminished, a return to the straight stem rather than sustained bloom.

Imagery and symbolic detail

Recurring plant imagery functions as symbolic anatomy: pods as “blind lanterns”, flowerets as “blue eyes”, anthers and goblet edges as erotic or consumptive elements. These sensory particulars—color, shape, and reproductive terminology—blur botanical and human realms, inviting a reading that oscillates between admiration and clinical detachment.

Concluding insight

Williams compresses observation, desire, and disillusion into a single sustained metaphor. By rendering a gaze as a small, carefully described plant, the poem suggests that looks can be both generative and diminished—beautifully composed yet subject to the same cycles of fruition and decline that govern life itself.