Journey To Love (William Carlos Williams) - "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

The crowning poem of the collection is "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," about which entire books have been written. By far the longest piece in the volume at thirty pages, this four-part pastoral love poem was originally envisioned as the fifth book of Paterson. He began writing it in 1952 in the midst of health problems—physical (a heart attack and multiple strokes that left him, among other things, with periods of near-blindness and partially paralyzed, able to type only with one hand) and mental (depression). Facing death, he confessed old adulteries to his wife. In this context, he wrote "one of the most beautiful affirmations of the power of love in—and against—the nuclear age, and one of the few memorable love poems in English written not for a mistress but for a wife." He reviews their life together and states that her forgiveness of him has revived him.

Although hardly the most profound thing in the poem, one section is much quoted:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

A different excerpt from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" was used in the fifth and final movement of The Desert Music, a composition for chorus and orchestra or voices and ensemble by Minimalist composer Steve Reich in 1984.