07 June 2018

Poetry Thursday - The Great Figure by William Carlos Williams

NY Met demuth figure 5 gold.JPG
Charles Demuth, "I saw the figure 5 in gold", 1928 (via)

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

-- William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

In 1920, William Carlos Williams scribbled this poem on a sheet of paper while he was walking in Manhattan - when a phrase came to mind, he would write it down on anything to hand, and some of his poems were born on prescription blanks and others written in a few minutes between seeing patients in his medical practice. "The Great Figure" inspired his friend Charles Demuth to paint The Figure Five in Gold in 1928. 

Later, Robert Indiana based a painting on Demuth's -
Robert Indiana, The Figure Five, 1963 (via)

1 comment:

Charlton Stitcher said...

‘I saw the figure 5 in gold’ ... yes really, Demuth’s work was on show in the Ashmolean when I visited last month in the America’s Cool Modernism exhibition and there until 22 July. It was a very striking in work in an excellent exhibition - and definitely well worth a visit to Oxford if you haven’t already been.