William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” or “The pure products of America / go crazy” from Spring and all (1923)
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentuckyor the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes andvalleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity betweendevil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturdayto be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have nopeasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flauntsheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terrorunder some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum
which they cannot express-Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian bloodwill throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murderthat she’ll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state andsent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—some doctor’s family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with brokenbrain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breastsaddressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyesas if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some skyand we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filthwhile the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod inthe stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy usIt is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given offNo one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car