In this new American free verse, th

In this new American free verse, the line break became Williams’s great, virtuosic instrument and “To a Poor Old Woman” is a bravura performance. Its repeated independent clause, “They taste good to her,” becomes something like a scientific experiment: line breaks vary, while the rest of the language (the same words in the same order) remains constant. We thus see the power that enjambment can exert over sentence sound and meaning. The first iteration works as a sort of control group showing the sentence whole, as a line without enjambment (“They taste good to her”). They taste good, rather than bad; Williams can see, and we see with him, how much she enjoys them. The second iteration (“They taste good / to her”) suggests that they might not taste good to us (unless we are poor); her hunger leads her to rate the plums more highly than we would. And the next restatement (“They taste / good to her”) could imply that, while they may taste good, they look ugly (spotted, bruised, discolored, or half-rotten). The break after “taste” also emphasizes “good,” so that we ask what good means, what might be “good to her.” The last line repeats the sentence without enjambment. In between comes more description, as in a cinematic close-up: to know more about what “good” means to her, we have to look longer at her.

Other stanzas further reveal the beauty in Williams’s irregular yet patterned verse. Williams never uses the sort of rhyme schemes we might find in someone like Robert Frost, but he does embed half-rhyme in couplets: “herself . . . half,” “the air . . . to her.” “Comforted . . . ripe plums” revels in “o” and “u” sounds, in repeated “p” and “m,” and brings back, perhaps, the sounds in “munch.” The poem tries to savor its sounds, as this old woman savors her fruit. When “To a Poor Old Woman” appeared in a magazine in 1934, the last stanza began “Comforted, relieved—”; Williams’s revision emphasizes the positive idea of comfort, not the negative one of “relief” from privation, by giving the poem its only one-word line.

In recordings of Williams reading this poem and others, he does not pause at line breaks, but uses them as marks of emphasis. To hear him read these lines is to see how enjambments allow him to choose among the potential meanings and tones for his key words. Such lessons in listening also become lessons in democratic sympathy. Listening to these lines about this woman means paying sustained attention to her by listening to language she might use (all common monosyllables, repeated) and thinking about what she enjoys and how she might feel. For Williams, the neglected syllables, the “common” and too often overlooked words in our language, correspond to the “common” people and to common pleasures: as we attend to one, we defend them all.

“To a Poor Old Woman” might end on a lesson especially appropriate for the Depression, a lesson about charity, pity, and social class. If we are fortunate enough to read modern poems frequently, if we are closer in social position to Williams than to the woman of whom he writes, we ought to think, when we think of “the poor,” not of abstractions to be treated alike but of many people with many tastes. “They taste good to her,” the complete independent clause, recurs to conclude the poem. As a stand-alone line, it does not give, as the earlier stanza did, some contrast between what she does and what we might do, between what the plums are to her and what they might be to us; rather, it offers the simpler fact of her delight, her “solace . . . seeming to fill the air.” She becomes an example, and not only a political, ethical one: she (via Williams) might help us to enjoy life—to enjoy what we hear, and what we taste—ourselves. No wonder, then, that in these sixteen lines Williams finds pleasure in all five senses: sight, hearing (the onomatopoeia of “munching”), taste and touch (her lips on “sucked out” fruit), and finally the savor of plums in the air.