"The Yachts," which has been much anthologized, combines a relaxed narrative mode with a sudden nightmare shift of image to render the mind's discovery of the relentless tyranny exercised by its own beautiful instruments--whether they be economic institutions, conquests over nature, or other images of ideal competence. The poem seems limited, however, by the very lack of preparation (and hence justification) for that sudden shift; we assent to it as a paradigm of something known outside the poem rather than find it inherently revelatory.

The Yachts," that often anthologized, uncharacteristic effort of Williams, which Williams liked though he knew its technique was imitative. He had begun it with Dante's terza rima since he was borrowing the scene from the Inferno where Dante and Virgil must cut through the arms and hands of the damned floating beneath them who try to sink their small boat.

In 1955, Williams folded into a file a set of notes containing the following gloss of “The Yachts”: “It is a false situation which the yachts typify with the beauty of their movements while the real situation (of the poor) is desperate while ‘the skillful yachts pass over.’” On one hand, this information helps readers tremendously; it supplies them with a rubric for understanding the relationship between the two very different scenes depicted in this poem (one is “false,” one is “real”).

In this poem, Williams utilizes a yacht race to indicate the lack of class mobility in American society and the wide gulf that exists between upper and lower classes. He presents a picture in which the yachts survive stormy waves and keep on entering races without taking note of the large number of people who fall into the sea and struggle to clutch at the prows of the yachts. The “well made” smooth indestructibility of the yachts suggests how difficult it is to redistribute the social resources between the rich and the poor.

"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" is a rather long meditative poem, divided into three books and a coda. The poet is addressing his wife, whom he has abused through his sexual and artistic pursuits. He is approaching her one last time, reviewing their life together and asking her forgiveness. Here Williams is no longer dispersing himself into a set of objects; the "I," slowly purged from his verse in the teens, now returns in the figure of a wise old man who, while aware of loss and suffering, offers advice, hope and consolation.

"Asphodel". . .speaks from a plane beyond differentiation, from the site of memory where "all appears/ as if seen/ wavering through water," perspectiveless like the time of beginning itself. It is a "cry/ of recognition" which penetrates the veil of history to connect his "Approaching death" with his origins. Interestingly, it has been the poem most praised by critics because of Williams' late breakthrough, presumably like Stevens', to a new lyricism. And this signifies not simply an advance beyond Paterson but a reversal, perhaps, ironically, a return to the tradition.

In one of the last poetry readings he was able to give, at Wellesley in 1956, Williams read "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower." Lowell movingly recalls the hush that fell over the enormous audience when the now-famous poet, "one whole side partly paralysed, his voice just audible," read this "triumph of simple confession". . . .

Finally there is "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," the extraordinary love poem of Williams' old age. This poem has the quiet mastery of supreme attainment. Like Paterson Five and "The Desert Music," "Asphodel" gathers the world together and the lines rise continuously from a center which is everywhere. Since the lines ascend one by one from the same unfathomable ground, each is the equivalent of the others, the same and yet different.

In Williams' very last poems, the conflict of engendering the work of art subsides somewhat. As we have seen previously (Chapter One), the more radical poetic practice of early Williams tied to memory as the place where this imaginative conflict occurs, yields in the later poems to a vision of personal memory. Perhaps not surprisingly, this later development allows Williams to write some of his most moving love poems, among them "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (PB, 153-182). Thus we come to an examination of Williams' later style in full awareness of its permutations.

"The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned.", says Williams at the beginning of his final phase, and he means by this a descent into memory, a descent into his own inner depths, wherein he finds compensation for the increasingly disturbing poverty of that which is revealed by the senses. Like Wordsworth at the Simplon Pass, Williams reaches a point at which the external world no longer seems to provide an adequate correlative for his desires and expectations. His only recourse is to turn inward, as Wordsworth does, in search of satisfactions which the outward world apparently denies.