Ephemera
1998 · Baltimore, Maryland
by Smith, William Jay
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Signed. Ephemera. VG. 8.5 x 11 cream card, folded in two horizontally, in middle. Red/black lettering and 1 bw illustration. The poem, The World Below the Window; title poem from The World below the Window: Poems 1937-1997 by William Jay Smith. Illustration by George Wingate. Printed at the Stone House Press. Signed by both Smith and Wingate. Possible additional signature (unreadable - could be a notation). Would look great framed. (Jeffrey Myers states "The World below the Window" (1957)--as perfectly intricate as verse by Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens--characteristically displays William Jay Smith's technical skill and ambitious themes, his lyrical response to the natural world and belief in the power of the imagination. Composed of four triplets, the poem employs four rhymes, the last two formed by participial verbs. With subtle repetitions and variations on these key words the poem progresses from the commonplace and specific to the lofty and abstract. The poem begins with ordinary pink geraniums and the alliterative "left last night on the windowsill." Then, with "now," it moves to the immediate present. The deliberately pedantic diction of "To the best of my knowledge" contrasts with the colloquial "out there still" (the last word again emphasizing the present moment). This phrase also hints at the epistemological theme--the investigation of human knowledge, the way external reality is perceived by the human mind. The speaker says the flowers "will be there [only] as long as I think they will." Their existence in his mind is more significant than in their pot. When he stops thinking about them, they will also cease to exist. The second triplet, echoing and varying most of line three, shifts from thought to vision. Following the epigraph from Emily Dickinson on the opposite page: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--/Success in Circuit lies," the poet, assuming his own angle of vision, looks aslant out of the window. He just manages to catch the bright color of the flower as he gazes at the world outside and below the window and contemplates the riverine view. In the first two stanzas the poet describes the world of day to day reality; in the last two stanzas the he glances at and then looks beyond this reality. ... ).
(Inventory #: 153354)