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Complete Destruction
195
"Complete destruction": The cold fact of death
YaoYao MacLean
Thesis
William Carlos Williams' Complete Destruction is about the cold fact of death's totality.
This meaning is conveyed through the use of imagery, tone, and rhythm.
thesis
imagery
The choice of words draws an image of death as a hard, common, and inescapable fact of life.
Imagery
"ICY"
"Icy"
Line 1: "It was an icy day."
The adjective "icy" sets up the poem's landscape as cold, hard, and brutal. The family pet has died and warmth has left their lives.
Vs:
Line 1: "It was a snowy day."
This image is softer, dreamier.
Common words
Common words
The common words "cat," "box," "back yard," and "fleas" describe an everyday scene: the burial of a family cat.
Death is not transcendent or majestic. Fleas, those most common and lowly of creatures, die. Described using common, everyday imagery, death becomes a fact of common, everyday life.
"Earth" and "fire" vs "Cold"
"Earth" and "Fire"
vs "Cold"
"Those fleas that escaped / earth and fire / died by the cold."
Earth and fire and the cold are agents of death. Earth is dark, suffocating. Fire is red, blinding. But the imagery invoked by the word "cold" is less tangible. "Cold," that ultimate agent of death, is invisible and inescapable. These properties bring to mind another invisible and inescapable agent of death – time.
tone
The detached, objective tone of the speaker emphasizes the cold fact of death. The tone is stripped of all sentimentality.
tone
syntax
Other than the one adjective "icy," the speaker's tone is void of modifiers, impersonal. It is as if the speaker has distanced himself from his grief in order to describe the burial objectively.
syntax
form
form
The form emphasizes this objective tone. There is no unusual use of brackets, italics, or comma placement that would imply the personality of the observer. The form does not even follow the convention of capitalizing the first letter of every line. Instead, the three sentences are punctuated just as they would be in prose, with the first letter of every sentence capitalized. The narration is straight-forward, letting the facts, the events described, speak for themselves.
rhythm
The jagged rhythm conveys death as a raw, unpolished, biting fact. Its blow is not softened or sugar-coated by a pleasing, lyrical rhythm which distracts from the content.
rhythm
Line breaks
line breaks
The narrator speaks in short lines that often break before a natural pause:
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.
Vs. a more natural break:
Those fleas that escaped earth and fire
died by the cold.
The abrupt line breaks create a jagged, uneven rhythm.
meter
Meter
The meter is uneven:
x / x /
then took her box
/ / / x / /
and set fire to it
Vs:
x / x / x / x / x /
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
The second example flows and is pleasing to the ear. It caters to our sensibilities. The first example does not beautify its content with metrical embellishment. There is no pretense in its delivery of the straight-forward facts.
Alliteration (A cacophony of consonants)
alliteration
Plosive alliteration (b, p, d, t) forces the reader to pause between words, thus preventing a flowing rhythm from forming.
This is especially prevalent in the last line of the poem:
died by the cold.
The reader must slow down between "died" and "by." Interestingly, this slowing down correlates on a content-level to the dying fleas, whose lives are in a sense slowing down.
conclusion
conclusion
The imagery of death by the cold conjures a sense of time's invisible decay, and by doing so, reinforces the totality of death. The objective tone and jagged rhythm present the fact of death unsoftened by sentimentality.
Williams' Complete Destruction is a chilling and powerful reminder of the inescapable fact of our mortality.