William Carlos Williams’s “The Farmer”

William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923) is oft commented-upon and analyzed, the long poem and prose text producing a number of his most famous poems (e.g. “Spring and All,” “To Elsie,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “At the Ballgame”) – though of course none of these were so titled in the collection itself, except being numbered by Roman numerals.  Less often discussed (this being relative, as what WCW poem has been left unanalyzed?) is number III, “The Farmer.”  Immediately preceding the poem, a prose chapter ends with the sentence, “I myself seek to enter the lists with these few notes jotted down in the midst of the action, under distracting circumstances  —to remind myself (see p. 177, par. 6 [so rendered in the Collected Poems]) of the truth.”  The reference produces the earlier sentences, “The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in a mind a vision of what he would be, some day.  Oh, some day!  But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is.”  Having dropped this only slightly mysterious wisdom on the reader, which seems appropriate to mention as a preamble, the poem begins.  (BTW, my analysis of WCW’s “The Farmer”originally came out of my graduate course-work with Professor Jon Thompson; I present it here with some more recent editing and writing, coming back to the poem anew.)

In “The Farmer,” Williams offers nothing less than a vision of the nature of art.  For Williams, the farmer is not a figure representing any supposed harmony between man and nature (as, for example, a traditional pastoral poem might assert), but rather he is more akin to an artist – a painter, a composer, or especially a poet.  Though Williams utilizes images of the natural world, in doing so he is not attempting to symbolically integrate the farmer with nature, but rather to show him at odds with it.  Here, the farmer and the natural world are in a sense hostile to each other.  The farmer must physically sow the earth, just as the poet must score their pages with words, or the painter their canvas with paint.  Williams expresses this in the violence and harshness of his images, and in the parallels he draws between the farmer and the artist.  The farmer/artist is an “antagonist,” as he wrangles with his medium and surroundings, and Williams suggests that there is an aspect of violence or antagonism in the creative process as well as in the agricultural.  Yet despite the violence inherent in such enterprises, both the farmer and the artist ultimately produce something valuable – art, crops – which, with this poem, Williams implies are both necessary sustenance for human life.

“The Farmer” opens with the image of the farmer himself, “in deep thought.”  The farmer in deep thought “is pacing through the rain.”  So far Williams has offered us nothing to make us suspect he’s going to do anything other than present a quaint image of country life.  However, the farmer here is not just “in deep thought,” but is also pacing “among his blank fields,” considering them – not unlike an artist before his blank canvas, or a poet before a blank sheet of paper, on the verge of creative action.  In fact, as Williams lets us know just a couple of lines later, he has “in his head / the harvest already planted.”  The farmer is a visionary; he sees the fields planted (planned) in his mind before he actually goes about it.  He looks on the fields as a medium, waiting to be acted upon, as an artist also interacts with their medium.

Williams goes on to delineate the natural world in which the farmer is situated, with this heavy-duty imagist passage: “A cold wind ruffles the water / among the browned weeds.”  Something, an active force (a cold wind), is acting upon something else (the water), which like the fields lies there passively.  The “browned weeds” add a vague sexual element.  “On all sides,” he then continues, “the world rolls coldly away: / black orchards / darkened by March clouds— / leaving room for thought.”  The surrounding world now takes on a hostile, menacing aspect – cold, black, and dark.  And it “rolls away,” in the sense of “away from.”  There is a disjuncture between the figure of the farmer and the natural world, humankind and nature at odds.  But this disjuncture provides the opportunity for thought.  Indeed it is human beings’ consciousness which in many respects sets them apart from the natural world, and it is also what gives them the capacity for art (suppposedly, anyway – we now know that other animals are capable of art as well).  Along with this, however, comes an awareness, and an enactment, of a sort of Heraclitean strife.  This is not a picture of harmony, or of the farmer at one with the cosmos.  Rather, the farmer must mold the materials, the earth, the fields, and make them into something other than what they are in their natural state, and doing so often seems to requires violent means.

The image of “the brushwood / bristling by / the rainsluiced wagonroad” echoes the earlier image of the “cold wind ruffl[ing] the water / among the browned weeds.”  The “wagonroad,” presumably a muddy dirt road, is “rainsluiced” – in other words cut into by the running liquid – thus deepening the impression of the violent nature of the poem’s subject matter.  The brushwood is “bristling,” adding a further charge of strife and dissension.  Williams specifically contextualizes the farmer in relation to all of this – the passage actually reads, “Down past the brushwood/ bristling by / the rainsluiced wagonroad / looms the artist figure of / the farmer…”  The farmer is not a disinterested personage.  He is intimately involved (he “looms” over the whole scene), and, for Williams, cannot pretend otherwise.  But it is not enough for Williams to say something as simple as, “A farmer is like an artist…”  No, the poem is also about the nature of art itself.  What Williams is actually saying, then, is that there is a certain aspect of violence in poetry as well.  The poet not only marks up the blank pages with ink and words is asserting theirself in the world, and actively inserting the poem into the world.

Having established that the farmer is an “artist figure,” Williams concludes the poem with two more words: “…looms the artist figure of / the farmer—composing / —antagonist”.  (The words being “composing” and “antagonist.”)  The meaning of “composing” should now be obvious.  Williams drives home the idea of the farmer as a poet – both figures needing to take action in order to accomplish their intentions in the material world.  The more important word, though, is “antagonist.”  Both words are set apart by the use of the long dash, but it is “antagonist” which closes the poem, and which earns the distinction of owning a line unto itself.  As an “antagonist,” the farmer, again, is neither disinterested, nor is he part of a harmony between nature and man.  The farmer does violence to the earth in his sowing, just as – Williams is clearly saying here – the artistic act is also a violent act.  He has agency, and he uses it – the poet marking paper with pen, the painter marking a canvas with particular strokes of paint, the wind ruffling the water, the rain sluicing the dirt road, the farmer sowing and planting the earth.  The artist is not neutral, the poet is not neutral, and the farmer is not neutral.  Each takes what they need through violent action.  The world of this poem is nothing other than a world of forces at odds with each other, endlessly clashing, yet, in this respect, productive.

Though it is not stated (it doesn’t need to be), the farmer in his wrangle with the earth ultimately produces food.  The poet of course produces poetry, and as a poet himself, Williams suggests poetry is on the level of food.  For Williams, poetry is just as much a necessary product of his artistic labor as edible crops are of a farmer’s sowing.  In this sense, “The Farmer” can be seen to anticipate WCW’s own more famous lines in the much later “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955): “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”