William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), whose “Spring and All” appeared as the Sun’s Poem of the Day on May 2, famously defined a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” It’s a strange metaphor — strange mostly in how inanimate it is, how mechanistic it sounds — and nobody really seems to know what he meant by it. Or else, on some intuitive level, as the staff at Poetry magazine assert, everybody knows what he meant. 

At any rate, Williams’ own poems function as things “made of words.” In consciously rejecting the metrical foot, occurring in strict patterns, as the basic element of which a poetic line is constructed,  he does not reject what the contemporary poet Lewis Turco calls “the dance of language.”  The amateur poet may assume that free verse of the sort that Williams wrote is easy to imitate, because it’s simply chopped-up prose. Yet in today’s Poem of the Day, the 1917 “Summer Song,” we can see Williams’ sense of the “measured line” — a line which, as Mr. Turco puts it, “looks, acts, and sounds like prose most of the time,” yet is governed by poetic considerations, chiefly the rhythmic impulses of the words which comprise it.

In this poem, a glimpse of the moon “wandering” from night into daylight, smiling a/ faintly ironical smile,” is a sort of call that prompts a response on the part of the speaker. The accentual lines consist largely of two stressed syllables. That strange moon-smile has three stresses, as if either the moon paused to smirk at the world beneath it, or the speaker paused to notice it, or possibly both — the strange moon-smile, but also the speaker’s final question, which is his answer to that smile’s invitation: “Where would they carry me?”

Summer Song 
by William Carlos Williams 

Wanderer moon 
smiling a 
faintly ironical smile 
at this 
brilliant, dew-moistened 
summer morning, — 
a detached 
sleepily indifferent 
smile, a 
wanderer’s smile, — 
if I should 
buy a shirt 
your color and 
put on a necktie 
sky-blue 
where would they carry me?

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.