William Carlos Williams 'The Great Figure'

The importance of a poem does not always come in its meaning. William Carlos Williams illustrates this in his work, “The Great Figure.” Being an extremely short story about a man seeing a fire truck speed past him on a gloomy night, the actual story leaves readers searching for more. Acting almost as a piece of rebellion against more traditional poetry, Williams is able to take the focus away from the physical meaning of the poem and make readers focus on the careful structural choices he made. The answer to the longing that readers experience is found in analysis of these choices. Through freedom of meter, language specifically focused on conveying vibrant images, and difficult to find moods, Williams is able to affect the reader much more
than with meaning.
With only 31 choice words, Williams is able tell of a brief, arguably regular and unimportant, moment.
Being written in free verse, the poem is not held to patterns and meter that comes with other types of poetry. The center of the poem is made up of four lines comprised of just one word each: “firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded” (6-9). By breaking the sentence up in this way, the reader is forced to take pauses between every line, even though grammatically, the sentence should be read as one continuous idea without pause. This freedom of structure allows for Williams to draw out the poem, made up of only one sentence, as long as he needs to by having the majority of lines be only one or two words. Thereby, the thought gets stretched out much longer than it really should, much like the moment that the poem was written about; the fire truck driving down the street had enough effect on the narrator that it transcended the short time it actually
happened.
Unlike the majority of poetry, a reader does not have to search for the lesson in this poem, as there is not one to find.
However, where the poem does choose to focus its efforts is imagery. Following the Imagist movement, Williams favored sharp language void of needless words that conveyed detailed and vibrant images. “Among the rain / and lights” (1-2), we can clearly see the great figure that the title of the poem is referring to: “the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck” (3-6). We can also see the person standing alone in “the dark city” (13). So clear is this “figure 5” that the artist Charles Demuth made a painting entitled I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, putting the main images from the poem into a physical painting. The painting depicts a golden 5 on top of a background of unruly reds, blues, and whites symbolizing the fire truck, the dark city, and the lights lining the city streets. This painting allows for us to be brought into the speaker’s memory of the fire truck, which is the entire basis of this poem. In addition to the images painted in the language of the poem, the physical shape made by the words’ positioning takes up a lot of space, much like the fire truck in the physical moment and in the memory of our speaker; he cannot get this fire truck out of his
mind.
Starting with a solitary person on the streets accompanied by just “the rain / and lights” (1-2), the overall mood is set from the beginning as downhearted and lonely. Without any warning, a fire truck comes rushing past our lone narrator “moving / tense… / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling” (7-8, 10-12). And as quickly as it comes, the fire truck is gone, leaving behind just the echoes of “gong clangs” (10) and “siren howls” (11) in its wake. Again, the person is left alone on the dark city street to ponder, or ignore, the fire truck. And rather than thinking about the possibilities of where the fire truck is going or what emergency it has or is going to respond to, all he can think about is “the figure 5 / in gold” (3-4) on the side of the red fire truck. We as readers are left alone as well; we’ve come to expect some sort of lesson that you must read between the lines to find. Instead, he is left standing alone on the street, and we are left with no conclusion or antithesis to the fire truck, leaving everyone despondent.
Poetry does not always have to be a soliloquy of feelings and deep comparisons set to structures made hundreds of years ago. Every one of Williams’ different word and syllabic patterns are deliberate, which forces readers to think harder about them in order to get the picture he wanted to present. This interesting use of structure makes for a more interesting read, and a makes a poem that is potentially easy to dismiss as a short, unimportant piece have so much more depth to it than what meets the eye. Image above all; it truly makes poetry a more exciting thing to sit and figure out.


Writing Goals: Stay on topic. Don’t be too repetitive. Make sure argument makes sense.