Complete Destruction By William Carlos Williams

Complete destruction is a short poem written by William Carlos Williams. Williams is a famous poet known for his imagism and modernism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems in 1963. Williams originally went to college to become a family doctor, later he obviously switched his career path to become a writer. William Carlos Williams often wrote uncanny poems. If I were to ask him a question, I would ask him what situations in his life inspired him to write some of his weirder poems. One can look on the surface of “Complete Destruction” and only find a simple interpretation without much thought. If one did this, they would uncover a straight-forward meaning. There are no lines that are perplexing. A person’s cat dies from fleas, so they bury their cat and burns the box it's buried in, to kill all of the deadly insects. The fleas that aren't killed by the fire, die from the cold, or are buried alive. Though it is a short poem, 33 words, eight lines, and one stanza, there is a deeper interpretation. I believe that a major
I wanted to read deeper into Williams’s poem. A line that I found most interesting in the short poem is, “we buried the cat”. “We” shows that there is more than one person that is grieving with the loss of the cat. The comfort of people make it easier to cope with death. William’s added some literary devices in his poem. He used imagery when he writes “It was an icy day”. this gives one a description of the temperature and makes them feel the lack of heat in their bones. The author uses a symbol, fire, to represent evil and revenge. Fire is often used to represent the dark and evil side in a character. The owner of the cat demolishes the pests that killed their beloved cat by setting fire to the fleas. The use of an assonance is used in the piece of poetry. William’s uses the words fire and died to add to the flow of the