María del Carmen Quintero Aguiló
Reading the Shore from the “Edge, Unseen”:
Kamau Brathwaite’s Tidalectics in William Carlos Williams’s
“Flowers by the Sea”Tinta regada
1 de octubre de 2024
This is an exercise in the crossing of oars. An exploration of the spaces in-between, the perpendicularity of things that transcends to yield parallels. Such conflation makes its way into the mundane, the every-day comings and goings. But it also manifests in the physical and the temporal. There is an actual place where past and present meet, where time travel is not theoretical. Such space is also the Edenic seed of imagination. It is the physical manifestation of artistic creation, the foundational metaphor for poiesis. Such Ur-metaphor and physical space is the shore. On the shore the natural and cultural meet in an eternal dance. On this very shore with its time travelling flotsam and jetsam and its piercing of the temporal and spatial veil one can also observe the concretization of writing, of creating, and more specifically, the world-making power of poetry itself.
Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite, among others, view the shore as the ultimate liminal space in which nature and culture meet. It is where human history and natural history collide in an endless natural process that merits ritual status. Walcott’s essay titled “Isla Incognita,” as well as poems or collections of poems like The Castaway and Other Poems, with “Crusoe’s Island,” and his later autobiographical collection entitled Another Life, view the shore as the space for existential meditation, or as Mark McWatt writes, “The figure of the castaway alone on his beach suggests the loneliness of the artist, trying to make sense, not only of his world, but of himself in relation to it” (1611). The shore is therefore the site for artistic development and creation. As the speaker in Walcott’s Another Life realizes, the beach is where “I begin here again” (61), and where one is always beginning.
Taking all these perspectives on the shore as a space for identity formation, ritual, creation, and reflection, William Carlos Williams’s “Flowers by the Sea” can be read with the intent to re-member the imagist landscape poem and reassemble it as a Tidalectic poem that showcases the shore as its primal conceit. By omitting the shore and the crossings it emulates in the very dancing of the tides, can the whole meaning of the poem change? If the shore is unseen, how do the flowers and the sea shift in meaning? Is there a sea-change? And if so, what is it? If the switching and changing of referents, which is regarded by most as the poem’s core, depends upon the synthesizing nature of the shore, but the shore is unseen, what is the poem “saying”?
The title of this essay suggests the shore in the poem is absent, “unseen,” yet it shapes the speaker’s entire viewpoint and therefore the poem itself. This exercise seeks to Tidalectically re-view “Flowers by the Sea” from the perspective of the unseen shore to reveal how this omniscient, yet omnipresent space becomes the metaphorical ledge upon which the poem hangs on its meaning to set a course for future watery alter/native routes to further expand Williams’s poetics “beyond the can[n]on’s range” (Quintero 2015).
Tidalectic is Brathwaite’s version, or better said, anti-version of the dialectic. He defines it as “the rejection of the notion of dialectic, which is three—the resolution in the third. Now I go for a concept I call ‘tide-alectic’ which is the ripple and the two tide movement” (Naylor 145). Brathwaite utilizes the image of an old lady on the north shore of a Jamaican yard who is sweeping the sand away from her house. At first, he is baffled by such a futile ritual, exclaiming:
She’s going on like this every morning, sweeping this sand –of all things!—away from… sand from sand, seen? … And I say Now what’s she doing? What’s this labour involve [sic] with? Why’s she labouring this way? . . . Because I get the understandin(g) that she somehow believes that if she don’t do this, the household –that ‘poverty-stricken’ household of which she’s part – probably head of – would have somehow collapse. (Brathwaite 30)
This instance captures the deep-seated questions that have forever plagued the Caribbean artist:
What is Caribbean/the Caribbean? What is this –this archipelago, these beautiful islands – yes – which are contrasted in their beauty with extreme poverty and a sense – a memory – of catastrophe What is the origen (spelling as in original) of this … this paradoxical and pluraradial situation? (Brathwaite 33)
The epiphany comes when Brathwaite sees her again, as if for the first time:
And then one morning I see her
body silhouetting against the
sparkling light that hits the
Caribbean at that early dawn
and it seems as if her feet,
which all along I thought were
walking on the sand…were
really…walking on the wat-
ter…and she was tra
velling across that middlepass
age, constantly coming from h
ere she had come from – in her
case Africa – to this spot in
North Coast Jamaica where she
now lives … (Brathwaite 33)He explains to the audience that hers is an endless ritual, the ritual of the Caribbean existence which is anti-dialectic, “anti” in the sense that the people in this region cannot be “successfully dialectic,” but instead tidalectic (Brathwaite 34) because of an on-going continuum. The Caribbean experience is therefore an ongoing answer that departs from the Western Sisyphean concept of existence. For Brathwaite, the existential image for the Caribbean is not an individual pushing a rock up a hill, but an old woman sweeping sand. As a result, Brathwaite proposes an “alter/native” model for existence that defies the Hegelian dialectic.
Hugh Fox explains that Williams “sees the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder” (285). In Spring and All Williams expounds on the matter claiming that:
imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it a description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it—it affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature…(Spring and All, 91).
For Williams as well as Walcott, if language is but a failed attempt to capture the ultimate form of language, which for them is nature, they leave us with the conclusion that “our only true apprehensions are through metaphor” (Walcott “Isla Incognita,” 57). Such as stance suggests the blunt realization that art, in this case poetry, will never truly grasp, or what George B. Handley calls “getting nature [and by extension, existence] right’ … in the same way nature exceeds metaphor” (5).
The way to apprehend the world becomes an incessant race or struggle to capture nature’s essence with lagging symbols, i.e. language and poetry. The beach becomes the most suitable metaphor for the eternal creation of metaphor because it infinitely erases all creation in a matter of seconds and impels the poet to continue striving for language, poetry, and newness. As Handley succinctly puts it, “It is a foundational poetry, but not in the sense of beginning for the first time; instead, it has a perpetual need to return to the elemental task of naming” (302). It is no coincidence that the final images of Omeros and Paterson take place on beaches, with Achille and Paterson (at the conclusion of Book IV) re-viewing their nations. They are not strangers making landfall but “alter/natives” who metonymically embody the adamic craftsman, poet, meaning-maker, and namer who will eternally create a national identity, consciousness, and culture based on nature’s regenerative prowess and gaze.
One of the principles of imagism is what James Guimond defines as the “direct treatment of the thing” (96). Imagism’s primary tenet is therefore what autotelic nature already provides: the clearest view in human language. In his notes to Paterson, Williams writes “that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions” (xiv). The hero’s quest in Paterson is to arrive at an American language that will capture his America as nature would, in its purest form. The frustrating journey to articulate this is echoed in Achille’s quest in Omeros as both characters end at the start, on shores. So, if William’s central conceit is man as city, I propose man as shore with the experimental exercise of reading “Flowers by the Sea” from a Tialectic perspective.
What happens when the shore doesn’t have a visible sandy coast? When the shore is rocky and jagged? Does that allow for the analogy to continue? Can there be “sheets of exploding surf” (Walcott, “The Sea is History”) that allow for a palimpsest of poetic creation? “Flowers by the Sea” is an imagist landscape poem composed of eight lines divided into two stanzas.Flowers by the Sea:
When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s
edge, unseen, the salt oceanlifts its form—chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alonebut color and the movement—or the shape
perhaps—of restlessness, whereasthe sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem(Collected Poems Vol. 1 1909-1939, 352)
The poem begins with the word, “When,” which suggests continuity. Something that happens rhythmically, ritualistically even, evoking in turn the concept of time. “When” means cuando in Spanish, which implies a temporality of sorts, a time of day when something occurs. In the case of this poem, there’s a specific moment that the ocean and vegetation meet in an unusual manner. The tides have a similar pattern in the sense that at specific hours of the day is when high tide and low tide occur. These are pivotal moments of transformations, or a type of magic hour, where a piercing of the spatial veil occurs. This would suggest a brief aperture for happenings that “open the doors of perception,” to use Blake’s words, that in turn deserve contemplation, admiration, and the flawed human attempt to capture such moments of magic. So, when fields of flowers shapeshift to the point of appearing angular, or “sharp,” to use the speaker’s word, a merger of sorts begins to take effect and shape so that the flowers meld into the rocky topography of what appears to be a jagged cliff with the sea underneath.
There is therefore no beach or sand in this poem, no gradual palimpsest wherein the union of land and sea create and destroy eternally, as there is no visible sand on which to metaphorically write. However, what might presumably be the hightide—the ocean is described as lifting its form and could therefore be expanding and swelling—is impacting the speaker’s point of view where the fields of flowers and the sea become one, so much so that they embrace to the point of unrecognizable distinction. The sea becomes the land, and the land becomes the sea.
As “The salt ocean // lifts its form” the sea reveals itself as an apparition. An arrival that perhaps is unexpected for the speaker. Such a moment, like Brathwaite’s scene with the woman sweeping sand, becomes an epiphany, a “spot of time” that beckons introspection and re-view. The ocean arises unannounced, and the speaker is stunned by such oceanic presence and its ensuing effect. The sea’s grand entrance into the scene becomes a shift in signifier within the speaker. To put it simply, the speaker is “caught off-guard” not only by what they witness, but about what visually and emotionally occurs thereafter. At this moment, what at first seems like a landscape poem, turns into a protean manifestation of the blurring of lines, of fronteras, and the creative power this holds. Without the ocean the transformation in the landscape and seascape would not be possible. It is the sea which serves as the catalyst for change and a refashioning and expansion of knowledge.
The flowers of chicory and daisies also transform not only in shape but also in their respective natures. They become “tied” to the sea’s gravitational pull and ebb and flow as the tides, with their colors of violet/blue and white emulating the colors of the surf. Their essence of peacefulness transforms into “restlessness,” suggesting the ocean is anxious for the speaker. Anxious perhaps because of the unspoiled truths it contains. Such truths may be the history and memory it holds, but it may also be the truth of relativity—the sea’s ability to transcend realms and thus enable the actual crossing of borders, essences, and natures. The speaker witnesses for a moment what it means to sea/see and is therefore transformed to a “sea view” so that the “[C]hickory and daisies / tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone // but color and the movement—or the shape / perhaps—of restlessness” (3-6). The speaker gets to read like the shore; they are observing beyond the human I/eye so that flowers attain qualities that would otherwise seem counterintuitive. The shore lends this gaze to the speaker, thus enabling the most open, oceanic view of all: a non-human eye/I.
The beach is thus the metaphor that enables the metaphors of the sea and the flowers—a type of meta-metaphor. The unseen shore allows the sea to become flowers, peacefully swaying in the breeze yet anchored with stability like plants. It therefore attains the essence of the land, stable, and thus experiences a kind of rest of movement, a pause in its eternal rhythm of the tides. It experiences the relief of rest and stasis, and most important, it gets to “feel” an “alter/native” ethos. The crossing of natures thus enables a communion of sorts between spaces that may lead the way to a promise of other communions between humans, countries, cultures, races, genders, and ethnicities. What naturally occurs in the landscape at hightide can serve as the paradigm for plausible pathways or waterways for peace. By crossing borders, cruzando fronteras, one erases them, and through such erasure one is one step closer to nature’s gaze and power in all its arbitrary benevolence.
This brief tidal experiment’s main objective is to invite further scholarship on the role of nature in Williams’s poetics and how the beach serves as the locus for poiesis, or world making through words. It is my hope that with this exercise in revisions through re-vision future scholars may continue the Tidalectical dialectic with additional “alter/native” readings of “Flowers by the Sea” so that Williams’s work continues crossing borders and in turn swelling like the salt ocean. We must strive to be like Paterson and Achille: a perennial adam “able to live the relative after having suffered the absolute” (Glissant 147). There is no place like the beach to forever start unearthing works that have been kept in absolutes and bring them back home to the shoreline.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Kamau. ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. We Press, 1999.
Breslin, Paul. “Derek Walcott’s ‘Reversible World’: Centers, Peripheries, and the Scale of Nature.” Callaloo, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 8-24.
Fox, Hugh. “The Genuine Avant Garde: William Carlos Williams’s Credo.” The Southwest Review, vol. 59, no. 3, 1974, pp. 285-99.
Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash, Virginia UP, 1989.
Guimond, James. The Art of William Carlos Williams. Illinois UP, 1986.
Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Georgia UP, 2007.
McWatt, Mark A. “Derek Walcott: An Island Poet and His Sea.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4, 1988, pp. 1607-1615.
Naylor, Paul. Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Northwestern UP, 1999.
Quintero, Maria del Carmen, et. al, editors. Caribbean Without Borders: Beyond the Can[n]on’s Range. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015.
—. “Endlessly Making the Nation: Tidalectically Synthesizing Nature and Culture in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Dissertation, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, 2016.
—. “The Sands of Un-Certainty: Tidalectically Synthesizing Nature and Culture in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The CEA Critic, vol. 81, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-10.
Walcott, Derek. Another Life. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973.
—. Collected Poems 1948-1984. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
—. “Isla Incognita.”1973. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George B. Handley, Virginia UP, 2005, pp. 51-57.
—. Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Baugh. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.
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Williams, William Carlos. “Flowers by the Sea.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol. 1 1909-1939. Edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, Carcanet, 1986, pp. 352-352.
—. Paterson. 1946. Edited by Christopher John MacGowan, New Directions, 1992.
—. Spring and All. 1923. New Directions, 2011.
