The Lonely Street

School is over. It is too hot
to walk at ease. At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall. They hold
pink flames in their right hands.
In white from head to foot,
with sidelong, idle look—
in yellow, floating stuff,
black sash and stockings—
touching their avid mouths
with pink sugar on a stick—
like a carnation each holds in her hand—
they mount the lonely street.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 21, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Lonely Street” appears in William Carlos Williams’s fourth poetry collection, Sour Grapes (The Four Seas Company, 1921). In his article, “Williams’s ‘The Lonely Street,’” Dr. Clay Daniel, a professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley, observed that “William Carlos Williams commented on his volume’s title, Sour Grapes (1921), ‘[A]ll the poems are poems of disappointment, sorrow. I felt rejected by the world.’ Williams himself stated, in his autobiography I Wanted to Write a Poem, ‘But secretly I had my own idea. Sour grapes are just as beautiful as any other grapes.’ ‘The Lonely Street,’ in particular, synthesizes the bitter and the beautiful […]. ‘The Lonely Street’ inscribes the feminine in an anonymous loitering ‘they’ of sly looks and light, floating attire. Rather than generating seductive or procreative warmth, ‘they’ are one with a withering, teasing heat that has driven the community from their ‘lonely street.’”