To Elsie Poem Analysis

Anna Baldwin

Dr. Shaheen

Literary Analysis

The Pure Products of the American Dream What is the American Dream? In the poem, To Elsie, William Carlos Williams asks us the many questions lurking beneath the pavement of our perception behind the American dream. Questions such as: what are the ‘pure products of America’ and what is the reality of this imagined concept? Through various techniques of texture and form, Williams paints the desolate portrait of an America that has been forsaken.

In To Elsie, a depraved America is personified through the history and conception of a woman named Elsie. The poem begins in the muck and destitution of the lower-working class. When a woman is raped and a child named Elsie is born out of wedlock;

The “product” of this violence becomes the subject in which this poem is addressed; Elsie from the very start lives in coexistence with the pattern Williams is trying to relay. Elsie is a child born out of wedlock, “Unless it be that marriage… will throw up a girl so desolate… rescued by an agent— reared by the state”( l.28, l.31, ll.34-36). The subject’s name is first mentioned, quite sparingly, as “some doctor’s family, some Elsie—“(l.40). Not given even the significance of independence from family in which she works for. She is not Elsie but rather ‘some Elsie,’ suggesting that she is simply some nobody. The first impression we have of her is with great carelessness—“broken” brain, “ungainly” hips, and “flopping” breasts (ll.42-45)—entirely physical and crudely descriptive. She is the target of “rich young men with fine eyes” and “cheap jewelry” (ll.46-48). These lines are a parallel comparison to the “devil-may-care men” on the railroad who tricked young slatterns with gaudy trinkets. This suggests that both rich and poor are composed by the same cycle of degradation. Elsie is an analogy of this idealized America, some nobody, “expressing with broken brain the truth about us—” the truth of how we act, “… as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky,” (ll.42-43, ll.49-51)

The poem’s tone is a recycled process of initial innocence to eventual corruption and then death, “we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth” (ll.52-54).Yet what do we hunger for? At stanza 19, the tone takes a turn in language —“imagination strains after deer,” “fields of goldenrod,” “stifling heat of September”— and paints a mural of warmth and golden glow that mimics the imagined American dream. This use of imagery within golden fields parallels with the natural description of the “choke-cherry” and “viburnum” all seemingly pointless nature clichés but with lurking irony beneath their intention. With the use of the words ‘strains’ and ‘stifling’, with their emphasis on the ‘st’ sound, there is a mockery of discomfort that paves way for the following line, “Somehow it seems to destroy us.” This portrait mocks of a perfect existence, while the reality of it suffocates us. A hunger to reach this ‘fields of goldenrod,’ when all there is filth and in death lies the disappointing truth that everyone succumbs to the same