Young Woman at a Window

William Carlos Williams

Young Woman at a Window
(1st version)

While she sits
there

with tears on
her cheek

her cheek on
her hand

this little child
who robs her

knows nothing of
his theft

but rubs his
nose

Young Woman At A Window
(2nd version)

She sits with
tears on
her cheek
her cheek on
her hand
the child
in her lap
his nose
pressed
to the glass

How many times in front of a nice scene we take multiple shots of the same picture? Some of us even get obsessive about it. Then, once back home, downloaded the treasure, we take a look at the results and we evaluate their quality. Some may give more importance to the focus, the brightness, what’s in the background or in the foreground, and in general to the technical aspects of the image. Some others may prefer the images that vehicle the message in a stronger immediate way, no matter the technicalities. A blurred, over-exposed, out-of-focus picture may be more powerful than a neat one!

The imagist poet might have been in the same situation and in this case the dilemma could have been whether to choose a more descriptive composition, where the action is clearly told, over a more static representation of the same scene.

Williams chose the first option to be published and probably regardless of the fact that that one was less respectful of the imagist canons (my guess is that he couldn’t care less).

In the first line of the first version we find the preposition ‘While’ that introduces the idea of duration, of a scene we are invited to look at. She is not just ‘sitting’, she is ‘sitting there’, in a physical place, in a given location. The child is ‘little’, this adjective being somewhat superfluous according to the imagists rules.

And the child is doing something; he’s ‘rObbing’ her, and ‘rUbbing’ his nose (remarkable the change of vowel that modifies the two words -a paronomasia- that winks the eye to a classical taste of poetry).

This version is not ‘just’ an image; it’s an ongoing scene, an ensemble of more photograms, maybe fitting better in a short video than in a static picture.

In the second version the poet has linguistically taken the flesh off the first version. There is no action, there’s no duration. The image is still. We just look at it. We don’t see the woman crying, we only see the tears on her cheek. The child is neither robbing nor rubbing, he’s a creature in the lap of the mother.

From the point of view of meaning, the two versions have in my opinion a major difference that lies in the absence of the ‘theft’ in the second. In the first version the child is given guilt, a responsibility, even though he’s not conscious of it. In the second the women could be crying for reasons we are not meant to know, and the child could be just a spectator, as we are.

In this sense, I may dare arguing that the author chose to publish the first version, in spite of aesthetical parameters, because it delivers more drama, more nuances, a deeper meaning and more cues for interpretation.