From poem XII in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923), a cubist rendering of a catch-all box and its contents:
But the starsThese lines seem to puzzle close readers. Marjorie Perloff, writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981):
are round
cardboard
with a tin edge
and a ring
to fasten them
to a trunk
for the vacation —
Finally, and most confusing, are the “stars” made of “round / cardboard / with a tin edge” inside the box or do they decorate its surface? How and why would one fasten “them” as opposed to “it” (the box) “to a trunk / for the vacation”?

To say that the image is not confusing does nothing to detract from the work of the imagination (the work of “seeing-as”) in these lines. Recall William Blake, who saw a world in a grain of sand.
Related reading
Other OCA WCW posts (Pinboard)
comments: 2
Hmm. I thought the 'stars' (best find, most interesting items) in the catch-all [box/drawer/basket] were immediately identifiable. (Is this age-related?)
We need a thornier mystery than that, we oldsters, eh?
I wonder. Marjorie Perloff is older than either of us. :)
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