William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” (1923)

The pure products of America go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains after deer

going by in fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car