Variations On A Theme By William Carlos Williams

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Analysis (ai): The poem adopts a flippant, almost manic apology that belies deliberate cruelty, subverting the sincerity expected in confessional forms; the speaker’s remorse is undercut by gleeful justification.

Structure and Form: Each stanza follows a loose triadic structure, echoing Williams’ spare lineation but injecting absurd exaggeration; the form nods to imagist clarity while destabilizing it with surreal, violent acts.

Intertextuality: In dialogue with William Carlos Williams’ plain speech and focus on ordinary objects, Koch parodies the seriousness of objectivist restraint, replacing it with hyperbolic destruction disguised as spontaneity.

Humor and Subversion: Unlike the earnest introspection common in mid-20th-century American poetry, Koch uses dark comedy and non sequiturs to undermine emotional authenticity, aligning more with the New York School’s ironic play than with confessionalism.

Agency and Power: The speaker’s repeated harm—physical, financial, domestic—masked as accident or impulse, reveals a critique of unchecked male privilege, especially in personal relationships, a theme less overt in Koch’s typically whimsical work.

Historical Context: Written during postmodernism’s rise, the poem resists lyrical sincerity dominant in earlier decades, favoring irony and fragmentation; it mirrors contemporaneous distrust in narrative truth and stable identity.

Authorial Contrast: Compared to Koch’s lighter, exuberant pieces, this poem stands out for its menace beneath humor, showing his range beyond playful abstraction into psychological unease.

Reception and Interpretation: While often read as a satire of poetic influence, a less-discussed angle views it as a critique of artistic creation itself—the poet as destroyer, tearing down structures (houses, savings, bodies) to assert control.

Modern Concerns: The poem prefigures contemporary interest in unreliable narration and performative guilt, resonating with modern discussions about accountability disfigured by self-justification.

Place in Oeuvre: Though Koch is known for lighthearted experimentation, this piece occupies a sharper edge in his corpus, revealing a willingness to unsettle rather than merely entertain, distinguishing it among his variations and homages.

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Kenneth Koch Follow

Mountain

Nothing's moving I don't see anybody
And I know that it's not a trick
There really is nothing moving there
And there aren't any people. It is the very utmost top
Where, as is not unusual,
There is snow, lying like the hair on a white-haired person's head
Combed sideways and backward and forward to cover as much of the top
As possible, for the snow is thinning, it's September
Although a few months from now there will be a new crop
Probably, though this no one KNOWS (so neither do we)
But every other year it has happened by November
Except for one year that's known about, nineteen twenty-three
When the top was more and more uncovered until December fifteenth
When finally it snowed and snowed
I love seeing this mountain like a mouse
Attached to the tail of another mouse, and to another and to another
In total mountain silence
There is no way to get up there, and no means to stay.
It is uninhabitable. No roads and no possibility
Of roads. You don't have a history
Do you, mountain top? This doesn't make you either a mystery
Or a dull person and you're certainly not a truck stop.
No industry can exploit you
No developer can divide you into estates or lots
No dazzling disquieting woman can tie your heart in knots.
I could never lead my life on one of those spots
You leave uncovered up there. No way to be there
But I'm moved.

Analysis (ai): The poem uses irregular line lengths and conversational diction, typical of Koch’s late-career blending of narrative looseness with philosophical inquiry, differing from his earlier, more overtly surreal or humorous works.

Tone and Voice: A reflective yet detached tone runs throughout, merging observational clarity with a wry intimacy; the speaker addresses the mountain directly, creating a dialogue between human restlessness and natural stillness.

Imagery and Setting: Snow is described with an almost anthropomorphic fragility, likened to thinning hair, suggesting themes of aging and impermanence, a motif less common in Koch’s typically exuberant imagery.

Temporal Awareness: The detailed reference to 1923 introduces a historical specificity unusual in Koch’s work, grounding the poem’s abstract musings in a moment of actual climatic anomaly, hinting at early ecological concern.

Silence and Presence: The repeated emphasis on stillness and absence—"nothing's moving," "no way to get up there"—positions the mountain as a zone outside human time and intervention, contrasting with Koch’s usual celebration of social and linguistic activity.

Isolation vs. Connection: While Koch often explores urban life and interpersonal dynamics, here connection is imagined through metaphor—"a mouse attached to the tail of another mouse"—evoking geological continuity and absurdity simultaneously.

Inaccessibility as Virtue: The mountain’s inaccessibility is framed not as failure but as integrity; it resists utility, development, and romantic projection, offering a rare celebration of unusable space in mid-20th-century American poetry.

Ecological Subtext: Written decades before climate change became a dominant literary theme, the poem subtly engages with environmental fragility through observations of seasonal unpredictability and snowfall patterns.

Philosophical Undercurrent: The questioning of the mountain’s history challenges anthropocentrism; its lack of recorded past does not diminish its significance, proposing a non-narrative form of value.

Contrast with Peers: Unlike contemporaries focused on confessional intensity or linguistic fragmentation, Koch employs accessible language to explore existential themes with wit and restraint.

Place in Oeuvre: This poem stands out in Koch’s later work for its restraint and focus on landscape, diverging from his more performative or comic modes, and signals a quiet maturation in his thematic concerns.

Rejection of Exploitation: The litany of what cannot be done to the mountain—no roads, no estates, no romantic entanglement—functions as an anti-capitalist, anti-domination refrain unusual in his otherwise playful voice.

Emotional Response: The concluding admission “I’m moved” is understated yet significant, marking a rare moment of sincere emotional disclosure in a poet known for irony and distance.

Modern Relevance: Its focus on ecological impermanence and uninhabitable spaces anticipates contemporary discussions about wilderness preservation and climate anxiety, albeit without explicit activism.

Figurative Language: The mouse simile, both whimsical and bleak, encapsulates Koch’s ability to fuse the absurd with the profound, a signature move rendered here with unusual subtlety.

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Kenneth Koch Follow

Variations At Home And Abroad

It takes a lot of a person's life
To be French, or English, or American
Or Italian. And to be at any age. To live at any certain time.
The Polish-born resident of Manhattan is not merely a representative of
general humanity
And neither is this Sicilian fisherman stringing his bait
Or to be any gender, born where or when
Betty holding a big plate
Karen crossing her post-World War Two legs
And smiling across the table
These three Italian boys age about twenty gesturing and talking
And laughing after they get off the train
Seem fifty percent Italian and the rest percent just plain
Human race.
O mystery of growing up! O history of going to school!
O lovers O enchantments!

The subject is not over because the photograph is over.
The photographer sits down. Murnau makes the movie.
Everything is a little bit off, but has a nationality.
The oysters won't help the refugees off the boats,
Only other human creatures will. The phone rings and the Albanian
nationalist sits down.
When he gets up he hasn't become a Russian émigré or a German circus
clown
A woman is carrying a basket—a beautiful sight! She is in and of
Madagascar.
The uniformed Malay policeman sniffs the beer barrel that the brothers of
Ludwig are bringing close to him.
All humanity likes to get drunk! Are differences then all on the surface?
But even every surface gets hot
In the sun. It may be that the surface is where we are all alike!
But man and woman show that this isn't true.
We will get by, though. The train is puffing at the station
But the station isn't puffing at the train. This difference allows for a sense
of community
As when people feel really glad to have cats and dogs
And some even a few mice in the chimney. We are not alone
In the universe, and the diversity causes comfort as well as difficulty.
To be Italian takes at least half the day. To be Chinese seven-eighths of it.
Only at evening when Chang Ho, repast over, sits down to smoke
Is he exclusively human, in the way the train is exclusively itself when it is
in motion
But that's to say it wrongly. His being human is also his being seven-eighths
Chinese.
Falling in love one may get, say, twenty percent back
Toward universality, though that is probably all. Then when love's gone
One's Nigerianness increases, or one's quality of being of Nepal.
An American may start out wishing
To be everybody or that everybody were the same
Which makes him or her at least eighty percent American. Dixit Charles
Peguy, circa 1912,
"The good Lord created the French so that certain aspects of His creation
Wouldn't go unnoticed." Like the taste of wheat, sirrah! Or the Japanese.
So that someplace on earth there would be people who were
Writing haiku. But think of the human body with its arms
Its nose, its eyes, its brain often subject to alarms
Think how much energy, work, and time have gone into it,
To give us such a variegated kind of humanity!
It takes fifteen seconds this morning to be a man,
Twenty to be an old one, four to be an American,
Two to be a college graduate and four or five hours to write.
And what's more, I love you! half of every hour for weeks or months for
this;
Nine hundred seconds to be an admirer of Italian Renaissance painting,
Sixteen hours to be someone awake.
One is recognizably American, male, and of a certain generation. Nothing
takes these markers away.

Even if I live in Indonesia as a native in a hut, someone coming through
there
Will certainly gasp and say Why you're an American!
My optimism, my openness, my lack of a sense of history,
My distinctive facial muscles ready to look angry or sad or sympathetic
In a moment and not quite know where to go from there;
My assuming that anything is possible, my deep sense of superiority
And inferiority at the same time; my lack of culture,
Except for the bookish kind; my way of acting with the dog, come here
Spotty! God damn!
All these and hundreds more declare me to be what I am.
It's burdensome but also inevitable. I think so.
Expatriates have had some success with the plastic surgery
Of absence and departure. But it is never absolute. And then they must bear
the new identity as well.

Irish or Russian, the individuality in them is often mistaken for nationality.
The Russian finding a soul in the army officer, the Irishman finding in him
someone with whom he can drink.
Consider the Volga boatman? One can only guess
But probably about ninety percent Russian, eighty percent man, and thirty
percent boatman, Russian, man, and boatman,
A good person for the job, a Russian man of the river.
This dog is two-fifths wolf and less than one-thousandth a husband or
father.
Dogs resist nationality by being breeds. This one is simply Alsatian.
Though he may father forth a puppy
Who seems totally something else if for example he (the Alsatian) is attracted
To a poodle with powerful DNA. The puppy runs up to the Italian boys
who smile
Thinking it would be fun to take it to Taormina
Where they work in the hotel and to teach it tricks.
A Frenchwoman marvels at this scene.
The woman bends down to the dog and speaks to it in French.
This is hopeful and funny. To the dog all human languages are a perfumed
fog.
He wags and rises on his back legs. One Italian boy praises him, "Bravo!
canino!"
Underneath there is the rumble of the metro train. The boy looks at the
woman.
Life offers them these entangling moments as—who?—on a bicycle goes
past.
It is a Congolese with the savannah on his shoulders
And the sky in his heart, but his words as he passes are in French—
"Bonjour, m'sieu dames," and goes speeding off with his identity,
His Congolese, millennial selfhood unchanging and changing place.

Analysis (ai): The poem examines identity as a composite of cultural, national, and personal traits, questioning the balance between universality and specificity. It challenges the notion of pure or singular identity, suggesting that even attempts to blend into another culture are undermined by ingrained markers. Unlike many mid-20th-century American poems focused on inner psychological struggle, this work turns outward, treating identity as performative and socially conditioned. It resists essentialism while acknowledging the weight of inherited labels.

Form and Style: Written in free verse with abrupt shifts and conversational rhythms, the poem mirrors the unpredictability of lived experience. Its prosaic diction and lack of metrical regularity align with postwar trends that rejected formalism, akin to Frank O'Hara’s casual tone but with more philosophical underpinning. The accumulation of examples replaces narrative or lyrical development, creating a mosaic of identity snapshots rather than a linear argument.

Historical and Cultural Context: Composed during late 20th-century debates on multiculturalism and globalization, the poem anticipates concerns about cultural assimilation and authenticity. While many of the author’s earlier works emphasize comic absurdity and linguistic play, this piece merges humor with socio-philosophical inquiry, marking a shift toward reflective maturity. It contrasts with the confessional mode dominant in American poetry of the 1960s and 70s by depersonalizing the speaker in favor of broader human typologies.

Less-Discussed Angle: Rather than celebrating diversity, the poem underscores its labor—how much effort goes into maintaining even the appearance of national or gendered identity. The recurring motif of time quantified (“fifteen seconds to be a man”) frames identity as a series of temporary performances, not fixed states. This temporal accounting introduces a critique of the exhaustion inherent in social categorization, a theme rarely addressed in discussions of multiculturalism.

Place in Author's Oeuvre: Among the author’s later works, this poem stands out for its sustained philosophical tone and diminished reliance on surreal humor. While his reputation rests on exuberant, playful verse, this piece demonstrates a willingness to engage with ethical questions about belonging and difference. It aligns with a lesser-known strand of his poetry that uses enumeration and list-making not for whimsy but for ontological inventory.

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Famous poet /1925 - 2002

Kenneth Koch

Variations On A Theme By William Carlos Williams

Mountain

Variations At Home And Abroad

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