This is the beginning of Section II of William Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson (1946), which is a kind of portrait of the author’s home city in New Jersey.

Robert Lowell confidently says that the “bud forever green / tight-curled, upon the pavement, perfect / in juice and substance but divorced, divorced / from its fellows” is the university, scholarship, or science, divorced from the city and its democratic life. I cannot vouch for that allegorical reading (bud=university), but the poem is surely about some kind of “divorce” between abstract thought and human needs. We know how things are going–badly enough to howl–but not why. Intelligence does not shape the flow; we watch coldly from afar.

These are challenging words for us who enjoy being inside that tight-curled bud.