Queen-anne's-lace
Queen-anne's-lace - meaning Summary
Desire as Field of Flowers
The poem compares a woman’s body to Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot), using floral imagery to explore intimacy and desire. Williams contrasts whiteness with small purple centers and maps a lover’s touch as a marker that draws individual fibers and tiny blossoms toward union. The field metaphor shifts between plentitude and erasure, ending on an ambiguous note where accumulated desire becomes an "empty" whiteness or possibly nothing at all.
Read Complete AnalysesHer body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth--nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over-- or nothing.
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