The Yachts by William Carlos Williams

First published: 1935, in An Early Martyr and Other Poems

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

The title of William Carlos Williams’s “The Yachts” serves as the first two words of the poem. Making the title and the poem continuous in this manner is a technique he uses elsewhere, in poems such as “To a Poor Old Woman” and “The Raper from Passenack.” It calls into question the separability of the poem’s subject and its expression. Yachts have always been an emblem of wealth, but beginning in the 1890’s they became particularly strongly identified with American business magnates who did battle for the America’s Cup in races off Newport, Rhode Island. Seeking both to retain the cup and to avoid being the first American to lose, J. P. Morgan, the Vanderbilts, and other tycoons sailed against foreign contenders such as Sir Thomas Lipton in huge racing craft that were aesthetic and engineering wonders driven by acres of canvas.

The poem is descriptive and narrative through the first eight stanzas but becomes nightmarish in the final three stanzas. Sea and harbor are very different domains, and the yachts that “contend” in stanza 1 do so with one another and not directly with the “ungoverned ocean.” Here, the yachts seem fragile and face outside the harbor an inimical force that “sinks them pitilessly.” Their implied delicacy of construction is confirmed when the yachts are described as “Mothlike in mists” and “scintillant in the minute brilliance of cloudless days”—a phrase that gives the entire scene the shimmer of a pointillist painting. “Ant-like,” the insignificant crew serves the yacht, “grooming” it like a queen insect, even while the yacht tacks to windward. The race marker—presumably the starting line buoy—is upwind from this regal object. Since boats cannot sail directly into the wind, motion toward the mark is accomplished with a technique called tacking. The boat sails at an angle into the wind, leaning away from it, and then is turned onto another tack, leaning the opposite way; it repeats this zigzagging until the goal upwind has been reached.

More of the scene comes into view in stanza 5. The eye now takes in the smaller craft, which, rather like the crew, are fawning admirers of the great craft. Invested with youth, beauty, and freedom, the yachts are personified and idealized. Stanza 9 marks a shift in the quality of the scene’s imagery and changes the relation of the yachts, the human figures, and the sea. Now, the waves, rather than the yacht, are fully personified, described as broken beings whose arms and hands seem oddly distinct and whose bodies are cut by the sharp bow of the yachts. Grotesque images of contorted faces on corpses awash in the waves coupled with sounds of desperate cries seem borrowed from the inferno of Dante’s damned or the paintings of purgatory by Hieronymus Bosch. The yachts have become powerful and indifferent.

Forms and Devices

“The Yachts” is composed in terza rima, a series of three-line stanzas that was used by Dante in the fourteenth century as the stanza form of the The Divine Comedy (c. 1320), and by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind.” In a fully realized terza rima, the three-line stanzas are in iambic pentameter rhythm and are linked by a complex overlapping rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, and similar patterns. Williams gestures toward this pattern of rhyme by making the first four lines conform to it. The rhyme is soon abandoned, however, with the loose rhythm of blank unrhymed verse used throughout the rest of the poem. Aside from making “The Yachts” unusual—Williams rarely borrowed traditional poetic forms—the terza rima recalls the theme of creation and destruction in the Dante and Shelley poems. Still, the lapsed interlace rhyme and Williams’s use of blank verse mark the poem’s origin in the twentieth century, and the reader might expect that the handling of its themes will similarly reflect a modern sensibility.

The relation between the sentence units and the individual lines and stanzas in “The Yachts” shows the strain Williams places on the traditional terza rima form. Lines and stanzas in the poem do not usually end with one of the natural breaks within the sentences. The first sentence ends partway through the second stanza, and within the sentence the phrases “blows of an ungoverned ocean” and “the best man knows to pit” are broken over two lines. This technique, enjambment, can be used to draw attention to the words at the line ends. In “The Yachts,” however, it mainly works in company with the many asides in the sentences to give the first six stanzas of “The Yachts” some of the improvised quality of speech. As a result, the image of the boats, not the poetic medium, is the center of the reader’s attention.

Short, terse sentences mark a shift in tone in the last line of stanza 7, at which point the race starts. Even expressions not formally set off as sentences—“they slip through…they take in canvas”—are independent. Stanza 9, in which the violent images are dominant, consists of sharply drawn lines, each a complete unit of meaning and perception. As the “horror of the race dawns” (perhaps the human race), the tidily punctuated images of action are replaced by the distortion and wandering focus of nightmare. Phrase is piled on phrase as the poem slows in the final three lines.

Williams was an exponent of poetic theories—first of Imagism and later Objectivism—that advocated the use of simple language to create clear, compressed images of objects. Poetic language was to be renewed by avoiding abstract or sentimental language, conventional poetic devices, and the insistent presence of the poet’s views in the poem. The yachts and their setting are described with precision; images, not commentary, are the basis of this poem. Yet, the language is occasionally sophisticated—“scintillant” and “sycophant,” for example—and abstract: “all that is fleckless, free and naturally to be desired.” Moreover, the human qualities of the yachts and the sea can be read as the projections of the poet’s own mood into these objects, giving him a tangible presence in the poem. Despite the poem’s success with his readers, therefore, Williams himself thought that “The Yachts” was consciously “imitative” and worried that he had forgotten to make the poem’s language and form characteristically American.

Bibliography

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Copestake, Ian D., ed. Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

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Lenhart, Gary, ed. The Teachers and Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1998.

Lowney, John. The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.

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Vendler, Helen, ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Random House, 1987.

Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1989.