Kora In Hell Improvisations 2 - Analysis

Perfection as a tiger lily, and the suspicion of it

The poem opens by pretending to give up: Why go further? But the question is a feint that lets Williams name the temptation he’s resisting. You could, he says, rectify the rhythm until you reach a finished object, as flawless and self-contained as a tiger lily or a china doorknob. Those examples are telling: one is natural beauty, the other manufactured polish. Either way, perfection becomes a thing you can hold, admire, and stop at. The speaker’s real claim is that this kind of completion is a trap—art as an immaculate product rather than an ongoing pursuit.

The tone here is quick, sly, and slightly mocking: the “worthy successor to—the man in the moon” turns artistic ambition into a goofy cosmic inheritance. Even the dash feels like a grin. The poem’s mind is energetic, not solemn; it can’t talk about seriousness without puncturing it.

Walking toward death, and the wish to bring back Euridice

Against that static perfection, the speaker offers movement: follow the wheel through, approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery. This is not heroic sprinting; it’s a deliberate, almost conversational pace. Yet the destination is stark: death is not avoided, only approached differently. The poem’s central tension sharpens here: if the end is the same, why break yourself polishing a willing phrase?

And then, in a sudden flare of myth, the speaker imagines bring back Euridice—this time! The Orpheus story is a story about art’s power and its failure: song almost defeats death, but not quite. Williams’s exclamation—especially this time!—sounds both hopeful and reckless, like someone repeating a doomed experiment because the act of trying is the point. It’s a credo for improvisation: you don’t perfect the plan; you re-enter the underworld and risk the turn of your head.

The “perfect rest” that feels like stoppage

After the bright rush of myth, the poem swivels into a cooler, almost scientific voice: Between two contending forces there can be a moment when equal stress produces perfect rest. That image of stability is visually serene, but the poem immediately darkens it: when the end drives back upon the beginning, the result is a stoppage. In other words, equilibrium can look like peace while actually being paralysis.

This is the poem’s most explicit self-diagnosis: the poet shrinks from the doom calling him and forgets delicate rhythms, preferring gross buffetings of fortune. The contradiction is pointed. The poet flees doom, yet chooses “buffetings”; he abandons delicate beauty, yet takes up harshness. The poem suggests that a writer sometimes chooses struggle not because it’s noble, but because it’s psychologically easier than the terrifying stillness of being “finished.”

Tunes that dart, eyes like hummingbirds

Section 2 returns to a more emotional, spoken urgency: Ay dio! The speaker could say so much, but the tunes changing keep escaping. Here, inspiration is not a single melody to refine; it’s a swarm. Try to keep up and the cart’s left you sprawling. Try the other way and you’re hip bogged. The poem dramatizes composition as slapstick pursuit—your body can’t keep pace with your own mind.

One of the strangest, best images lands as a complaint about light: when eyes are humming birds, who could tie them down with a lead string? Attention flits; perception refuses discipline. Yet the speaker admits that people want the very thing that won’t hold still: the tunes that go skipping out at the treetops. The tension is not simply between chaos and control; it’s that the audience’s desire aligns with the poem’s instability. The speaker is both tormented and validated by change.

Even so, the ending of this section won’t romanticize wildness: small comfort in naked branches when the heart isn’t set that way. After the leafy swarming and braided jackets, we get winter bareness. Improvisation can feel like abundance, but it can also drop you into a season of less—less cover, less warmth, less consolation.

Hilltops, jumping devils, and the mind as its own heckler

The prose reflection that follows reframes the chase as a moral-psychological climb: A man’s desire is to reach a hilltop, but a hundred jumping devils swarm him. The poem makes a daring move: these devils are also friendly images the man has invented. The obstacle is self-made—temptations, distractions, consolations, perhaps even the “beautiful” images that invite the writer to rest and disport himself rather than advance.

This passage clarifies the earlier suspicion of “perfect rest.” The devils aren’t only sins; they’re the mind’s toys, the little satisfactions that keep you from risk. The man is half a poet—a brutal phrase—because he longs to rid himself of his torment, but also clings to the invented companions that cause it.

Dirty pockets, market hands, and the cost of “fine” words

Section 3 drops into plain, almost domestic logic: if you hang clothes, you don’t expect them trailing in the mud; if you put hands in a dirty pocket, they won’t stay clean. The argument is simple, but it’s aimed at a complicated fantasy: the fantasy that art can remain pure while living stays messy. Williams intensifies it with the “market man” handling fish and cheeses, then imagining he can touch fine laces without wiping off on a soiled towel. The world of labor, bodies, and commerce stains you; you can’t pretend otherwise and still expect a fine trickle of words.

So the poem proposes a corrective: let us walk together into the air awhile first. It’s an invitation to cleanse—not into sterile purity, but into a shared atmosphere where words might move honestly. Yet even this generosity contains a harder demand: One must be watchman to secret arrogance. The poem’s enemy is not dirt; it’s the pride that believes it can leap from gross caresses straight into silver-tipped refinement.

Rendezvous in birch tips: leaving the would-be dancer behind

The ending becomes a flirtatious, impatient dialogue with a “sweet fellow” who wants to join the dance. The speaker insists, I do not wait for you—and then contradicts himself: I do not wait for you, always! That always is both promise and accusation. The other has broken himself without purpose; effort alone doesn’t count if it’s misdirected.

Then the true turn: the speaker hears music—Out of the ground?—and bolts toward it. He has a rendez vous in the tips of three birch sisters, urging, Ask them to play faster. What follows is a kind of ecstatic manifesto: he will dance with the wind, make snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to his own fuge. The closing cries—Huzza for the blue moss bank, the hollow log, and rain in the cold trees—choose humble, specific places as stages for high art. The poem’s final claim is clear: the real “music” is not the polished doorknob but the living world’s rough, cold, ordinary materials, turned into motion.

A sharper question the poem refuses to settle

If the speaker keeps abandoning the careful partner for the faster tune—saying I will return—later—is that artistic freedom, or another version of the “friendly images” that lure him away from the hilltop? The poem both celebrates and mistrusts its own swerving. Its improvisation is a dance, but it’s also a dodge, and Williams leaves that nerve exposed rather than resolving it.