William Carlos Williams

The Tulip Bed

The Tulip Bed - form Summary

Free-verse Observational Focus

The poem uses free verse to present a brief, concentrated suburban scene. Lines sketch light, shadows, and the street with spare, precise images that build toward a single, vivid focus: the tulip bed. The lack of regular meter or rhyme lets attention rest on concrete visual details and spatial relations, so the final image feels immediate and quietly observed rather than narrated or argued.

Read Complete Analyses

The May sun--whom all things imitate-- that glues small leaves to the wooden trees shone from the sky through bluegauze clouds upon the ground. Under the leafy trees where the suburban streets lay crossed, with houses on each corner, tangled shadows had begun to join the roadway and the lawns. With excellent precision the tulip bed inside the iron fence upreared its gaudy yellow, white and red, rimmed round with grass, reposedly.

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