This month I present a poem about abortifacients by Modernist poet William Carlos Williams, MD (1883-1963). Like Dr. John McEachin’s poem about abortion, “Oh To Wonder,” published here a year ago, this powerful poem, also written by a physician, is especially timely. Just this March, a federal judge in Texas heard arguments in a lawsuit which seeks to ban the drug mifepristone, the first of two medications (the second, misoprostol) used in a medication abortion, legalized in the U.S. in 2000. At present, the two-drug medication, the “abortion pill,” is legal in some form in 37 states, but this standard regimen for medication abortion could eventually be curtailed throughout the country.
Despite the long history of illegal abortion in the U.S., whether in-clinic or medication abortion, early modern American literature is replete with abortion narratives defending the practice, even anticipating the 1960s abortion law reform movement. If not always overtly sympathetic, the work of such literary figures as Eugene O’Neill, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis contributed to an early public abortion debate.
Add to that list William Carlos Williams, considered by some as the most important literary doctor since Chekhov. A novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1963, Williams practiced medicine as a family doctor and pediatrician for forty years in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. In his Autobiography (1951), Williams confesses his absorption with his patients: “calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives . . . for the moment I actually became them.” Explaining the role of interaction with patients in his writing, he adds, “[W]hen the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you . . . it is just a glimpse, an intimation of all that which the daily print misses or deliberately hides, but the excitement is intense and the rush to write is on again.” At the core of the Imagist movement, he felt that poetry must spring from “local conditions,” and he “was determined to use the material [he] knew,” his patients in Rutherford, his “inarticulate poems.” He would apply to them the Imagist principle of “direct treatment of the thing” in clear and concrete poetic imagery. Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain before him, he couched his subjects in American themes and sharp, colloquial language.
All of these directives are followed in the poem below, “A Cold Front,” a poem as topical today as when it was first published in September 1939. Here, an unnamed mother ignores her new baby’s “grunts of salutation” while she asks the poet/doctor for abortion pills. She is not opposed to motherhood as she has “seven foster children,” but she is like a “cat / on a limb too tired to go higher.” The double entendre of the title likens a frigid air mass to the coldness of the mother’s mindset: “I won’t have any more.” The doctor notes her “dead” face and “expressionless” eyes yet is not insensible to a “dull flush almost of beauty” in her face. While the poem ends on an ambiguous note, the mother, resolute in her harsh demand, is drawn sympathetically.
The editorial assistance of Cathy Chance Harvey, Ph.D., of Tylertown in the preparation of this poem is gratefully acknowledged. Physicians are invited to submit poems for publication in the Journal either by email at drluciuslampton@gmail.com or regular mail to the Journal, attention: Dr. Lampton.—Ed.
