William Carlos Williams

On Gay Wallpaper

On Gay Wallpaper - meaning Summary

Pattern Meets Weather

The poem observes a patterned wallpaper and shifts from its decorative motifs to the real weather outside. Bright, repeated floral and geometric shapes on the wall become a small, ordered world—"a moral sea"—whose artificial cheer contrasts with the rain and the day blowing in. The speaker registers how pattern, desire, and domestic life circulate together, turning a simple interior detail into a scene where imagination and weather meet.

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The green-blue ground is ruled with silver lines to say the sun is shining And on this moral sea of grass or dreams lie flowers or baskets of desires Heaven knows what they are between cerulean shapes laid regularly round Mat roses and tridentate leaves of gold threes, threes and threes Three roses and three stems the basket floating standing in the horns of blue Repeating to the ceiling to the windows where the day Blows in the scalloped curtains to the sound of rain

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