You drunken
tottering
bum
by Christ
in spite of all
your filth
and sordidness
I envy
you
It is the very face
of love
itself
abandoned
in that powerless
committal
to despair
William Carlos Williams was unlike any other poet of his time. He saw beauty and wonder in everyday things, such as grocery lists and notes on the refrigerator, while other poets of his time largely looked at ordinary reality with disdain. Many of his contemporaries, such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, looked to Europe for inspiration as well as technique, whilst Williams used his surroundings to draw universal truths about life. Therefore, much of his love poetry is about the conversations one has with a loved one, or about expressions of love in unexpected places, with a few sentences specifically about love strewn throughout the poems. He ingeniously uses familiar objects that are not normally portrayed as romantic objects, in order to depict the nature of love. Both Williams' realistic style and his unorthodox metaphors for love are perfectly displayed in "The Drunkard":
You drunken/ tottering/ bum/ by Christ/ in spite of all/ your filth/ and sordidness/ I envy/ you. It is the very face/ of love/ itself/ abandoned/ in that powerless/ committal/ to despair.
In this early poem, the scene slowly unfolds before us as we see how Williams views the drunkard - not only as disgusting, but surprisingly enough, enviable. The reader then finds an unexpected definition of love in the middle of this poem-abandoned in that powerless comittal to despair- about a drunken street person. This opens the utterance `by Christ' to a similie- how a drunken bum is like Christ in his acceptance of a despairing situation.
"The Drunkard" is one of Williams' earlier pieces, and it is a good example of the style and language he uses for the bulk of his work. It is short and to the point, and the language is straightforward and in an American dialect.