A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "Queen-Ann's-Lace"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "Queen-Ann's-Lace," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535831697

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Queen-Ann’s-Lace

William Carlos Williams

1921

Introduction

Queen-Ann’s-Lace appeared in William Carlos Williams’s fourth published collection of poems, Sour Grapes, in 1921. With its keenly observed and passionate images of flowers and women, this poem constitutes—along with Daisy, Primrose, and Great Mullen—the book’s well-known floral quartet, an example of Williams’s Imagist style. Queen-Ann’s-Lace is a love poem that shifts seamlessly between the image of a woman, imperfect and impassioned, and that of the beautiful weed also known as the wild carrot. The comparison of the beloved to a flower is nothing new: My luve is like a red, red rose, wrote Robert Burns in the late-eighteenth century. Reading in this tradition, it is tempting to say that Williams’s white field of wild carrot is simply a metaphor for the sexually aroused female body. But it is not as simple as that. Like many Williams poems, this one resists easy one-to-one correspondences and challenges the traditional uses of metaphor. On the other hand, the poem also contradicts what Williams himself said of it: Straight observation is used in four poems about flowers ..... I thought of them as still-lifes. I looked at the actual flowers as they grew. No one reading Queen-Ann’s-Lace, the famous The Red Wheelbarrow, or the epic poem Paterson would doubt that Williams knew how to look at things. But there is little still and little about the life of flower, woman, or even poetry itself, in Queen-Ann’s-Lace. Williams’s straight looking broke ground as a new way to handle the poetic line and image. But there is much more than straight observation at work here, as this poem’s last words tell us. Beyond what can be seen is the mystery of whiteness, silence, or nothing.

Author Biography

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. He died in the same city at age 79, on March 4, 1963, having married, raised two sons, and maintained a respected pediatrics practice, all the while living the intense life of a poet at the cutting edge of a new aesthetic. Few poets have been as committed to the local as Williams. Rutherford, the Passaic River, and his home at 9 Ridge Road have become synonyms for William Carlos Williams’s devotion to the here and