Red Lilies

Barbara Guest is clearly a language poet and her poem “Red Lilies” exhibits this fact. She uses the poem much as Williams would to cause the reader to depend upon the language alone for images of the objects described. She does this by using dependent clauses embedded in other dependent clauses to cause the reader to actually depend upon the clause before it for the clause at hand to make any “sense.” To Guest making sense of a poem seems to be more about actually allowing the poem to present the objects attached to words in the imagination and using them to build a group of objects. The congealing of these objects is not nearly as important and is, in fact, the indeterminate aspect of this poem. Some form may be extracted in her repletion of certain words, but one could not use this repetition to form an ultimate determined meaning of the poem. However, the reader is presented with multiple images and allowed to form their own synthesis of these images. The repetition should be considered significant in any interpretation of the poem for it is a poetic form in itself which should be allowed to give the poem as a whole an object-like aspect.