Love Song
Love Song - context Summary
Published in 1917
William Carlos Williams's "Love Song" was published in the collection Al Que Quiere! (1917). Presented as an expression of love, the poem collapses emotion and landscape into a single stained color image: love pervades and alters the world while the speaker addresses a distant beloved. Its compact, imagistic approach reflects Williams's modernist interest in plain diction and concentrated visual detail.
Read Complete AnalysesI lie here thinking of you: the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world— you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!
This is the 1917 book version of William Carlos Williams’s “Love Song,” collected in Al Que Quiere! It revises the 1916 Poetry magazine text that began “What have I to say to you / When we shall meet?”, removing the prelude and compressing the ending.
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