Primrose
Primrose - meaning Summary
Yellow as Summer Presence
The poem insists that yellow is more than a color; it is the experience of summer seen in many small, vivid particulars. Williams strings together everyday images—birds, children, flowers, a dead hawk, a man walking—to evoke a living, shifting yellow that pervades landscape and activity. The poem resists a single emblem (not merely a rose) and instead presents yellow as dispersed presence, a sensory mood spread across nature and human life.
Read Complete AnalysesYellow, yellow, yellow, yellow! It is not a color. It is summer! It is the wind on a willow, the lap of waves, the shadow under a bush, a bird, a bluebird, three herons, a dead hawk rotting on a pole-- Clear yellow! It is a piece of blue paper in the grass or a threecluster of green walnuts swaying, children playing croquet or one boy fishing, a man swinging his pink fists as he walks-- It is ladysthumb, forget-me-nots in the ditch, moss under the flange of the carrail, the wavy lines in split rock, a great oaktree-- It is a disinclination to be five red petals or a rose, it is a cluster of birdsbreast flowers on a red stem six feet high, four open yellow petals above sepals curled backward into reverse spikes-- Tufts of purple grass spot the green meadow and clouds the sky.
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