Examining Poetry

I wrote this response to a close reading "The Farmer" by William Carlos Williams (from Spring and All, 1923) for an English Literature course on regionalist poetry at Penn State University.

In his poem, “The Farmer,” Williams defines the relationship and boundary between two congruous entities: the farm and the farmer.  By making the image of the farmer separate from the image of the farm, Williams portrays the farmer as a participant in nature but not part of it.  A constructive hierarchy exists between the farmer and his land.  In addition to the keeper of the farmland, the farmer plays the roles of “artist” and “antagonist” (p. 41).

Williams portrays the farm as a rough and unruly landscape in poor shape and disarray.  The farmer observes the rain, mud, and weeds, and feels the cold wind around him in his fields.  The bleak land, on the verge of spring, (“darkened by the March clouds”), makes a hostile companion to the farmer as “on all sides/ the world rolls coldly away” (p. 41).  While the farmland exists for the farmer’s cultivation, during the winter months it becomes a wasteland, untouched by and unusable to the farmer.  Personified, the land doesn’t need or want the farmer to plow and till the soil and even resents his presence; the land doesn’t require a keeper to merely exist.  Left to its own devices, it would grow wild with unkempt weeds and grasses.  The farmer impedes the land’s natural growth by keeping it in order.

Williams presents the farmer as an “artist figure—composing—antagonist” (p. 41).  The likening of a farmer to an artist comes from the farmer’s position as one who surveys and plans the planting of crops in his “blank fields” like an artist would outline or sketch before painting on a blank canvas (p. 41).  He composes the layout, deciding, for example, whether a patch of tomatoes will border the field of wheat or line the rows of corn.  Each crop comprises a different color, texture, shape, form, height, etc. When everything blooms, the terrain turns into a landscape of multi-faceted artwork.  While the farmer certainly has informed, practical, and unaesthetic reasons for where he chooses to plant his crops, his schematic approach and the outcome of his labors make him an artist. 

 Williams’ image of the farmer as an antagonist evokes a sense of opposition between the farmer and the land.  The two images challenge one another.  The land, as nature, intends to grow weeds or to weather and erode.  The farmer, as the land’s groomer, intends it to perform as he directs it.  Williams calls him an antagonist because he works against what is natural to make the nature work for him.

To participate in nature, one has to change it.  The farmer’s changes to nature make him Williams’ ideal participant because they result in a symbiotic relationship between human and nature.  Planting seeds and weeding reroutes the life in the soil to produce a harvest of crops instead of weeds.  This benefits the farmer because he can feed his family and make a living, and it benefits nature because the land’s utility as farmland protects it from being razed and built upon.  Williams’ “farmer” at once embodies the figure of a heroic antagonist, preservationist and artist.