Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey, and— In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with nozzle searching the ground. —my head is in the air but who am I...? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me.
When I was 12 or 13, I found a box of books on the sidewalk on the way home from school. I’d recently gotten very into Shakespearian sonnets and was excited to find poetry books in the box. I don’t remember what other books were there, but the absolute standout was Sour Grapes by William Carlos Williams. When I look back at this book, I realize how heavily influenced my early work (and honestly, all my work) was by William’s style at this time. Sour Grapes was published in 1921 and didn’t get anywhere near the attention of 1923’s Spring and All, and that goddamned Red Wheel Barrow.
The Desolate Field is a powerful piece on perspective. The repetition of ‘vast and grey’ with its slow mutation from a literal vast and grey sky to the amorphous, ambiguous potential for love by the end of the poem highlights how skilled Williams already was with packing so much meaning into a simple image. I say “already” as if the man wasn’t nearly 40 at the time of publishing. The random frozen-moment-in-time feeling that is captured by the mention of the goat distracting our narrator long enough to change his perspective on the vast and grey is a beautiful reminder that sometimes we just need to get our heads out of our asses when the blues spiral starts in.