These - Analysis

Introduction

William Carlos Williams's "These" presents a bleak winter landscape that mirrors a deep inner desolation. The tone moves from bleak resignation to a cold, almost contemplative awareness, with occasional bursts of violent sound linked to war. Mood shifts occur as external barrenness becomes interiorized, producing a solitary, reflective final image. The poem feels spare, direct, and quietly anguished.

Historical and biographical context

The poem’s references to "flashes and booms of war" place it in a time when conflict intrudes on daily life; Williams, an American modernist writing in the early 20th century, often responded to contemporary social upheaval and the fragmentation of experience. This background helps explain the mingling of domestic emptiness and larger historical violence.

Main themes

Desolation and loss: The opening phrase "desolate, dark weeks" and images of empty beds, couches damp, and unused chairs create a pervasive sense of absence. Alienation of the self: The heart "plunges lower than night" into an "empty, windswept place," suggesting an inward exile parallel to the external winter. War and its echoes: Parenthetical aside—"(They whine and whistle) among the flashes and booms of war"—connects private grief with public violence, making loss both intimate and collective.

Symbols and imagery

The poem uses seasonal barrenness as a sustained symbol: winter stands for emotional sterility. Light appears paradoxically as "a peculiar light as of thought" and "a dark fire"—a mental, almost sterile illumination that "kindles / to make a man aware of nothing that he knows," suggesting awareness that yields no solace. Domestic objects—beds, couches, chairs—symbolize vanished relationships and routines. The stopped clock and "lakewater / splashing– that is now stone" close the poem with an image of time and motion arrested, implying both rupture and a frozen memory that nonetheless produces poetic perception.

Concluding insight

These elements together argue that poetry can arise from the encounter with emptiness: the poem treats desolation not merely as loss but as a source that, when excavated ("In this mine they come to dig"), yields a peculiar productive awareness. Williams leaves an open tension: the frozen world is both deadening and, paradoxically, the ground of poetic reflection.