Heavy with implications, "The Young Housewife" (1920) displays Williams' penchant for freezing a moment in time. The unnamed subject is distantly erotic in the poet-speaker's fantasy of her in a negligee or standing at the curb without a corset. She captures his attention by lifting her arms to tame an errant strand of hair. Retreating into metaphor, the observer rolls soundlessly by in his car as though deliberately distancing himself from her housewifely chores. The brief tension in crushing dried leaves derives from his declaration in lines 9 and 10 that she is a dried leaf. Drama emerges from the demands of housekeeping, which wither the beauty of a woman walled up in the wooden cubicle of "her husband's house" and only occasionally freed to the outdoors to dicker with tradesmen.
From the same period, "Portrait of a Lady" (1920) ventures more openly into erotic contemplation, a subject that embroiled Williams in domestic conflict with his wife, who harbored no illusions about his fidelity. The poet-speaker attempts to locate the source of female loveliness by fluctuating between metaphor and artistic representations of womanhood. Moving downward from thighs to ankles, his mind debates breaching the "shore," a euphemism for propriety. At the poem's climax in line 15, sand at the lips yanks the admirer earthward. After he returns to the polite abstraction of apple blossom petals, his better judgment urges him to write sedate, nonsexual verse.
