This poem was written in 1940 and in a time of great industrial growth in America, with unemployment down significantly and the country finally rebounding from the Great Depression. The world was at war once again, and the United States was right on the precipice of joining this effort. In the midst of this climate, Williams criticizes the long-held belief of some that nature is an escape from the worries of the world. Williams says that "the country will bring us / no peace," isolating those final two words on a line to emphasize the inherent loneliness in nature. He asserts that nature itself provides no guidance and cannot provide wisdom on its "furry stems / in the long grass."

Williams also uses a metaphor to connect love itself to nature:

Love itself is a flower
With roots in a parched ground.

He therefore links love to nature and shows that it struggles to survive in a climate of drought. If nature can bring no peace, neither can love. The romanticized images of other poets, showing the peace of being connected to the land through manual labor such as farming is dismissed by Williams who questions if such sentiments were ever true.

In the end, Williams asserts that peace does not come from the country, from nature, or from love. Having just recovered from an economic hardship that shook the country and looking at the likelihood of joining another war effort, Williams refuses to support the Romantic ideals of nature's ability to provide peace.

The theme of "Raleigh Was Right" is the loss of innocence over time. In the original poem that Christopher Marlowe wrote, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," the speaker tries to persuade his beloved to "come live with [him] and be [his] love" in the countryside, where he will give her all sorts of natural gifts. The Walter Raleigh poem "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" features the beloved woman pointing out that the flowers and all the gifts will fade away, as will love itself, and she would be naïve to believe otherwise. The nymph does not have the innocence that the shepherd expected of her.

William Carlos Williams obviously agrees with Raleigh, as his title makes clear. Yet he also goes farther, contrasting his own time with the simpler days in which the original poem is set. His time, he shows, has completely lost the innocence that existed before. Williams wrote his poem in 1944, during some of the darkest days of World War Two. He describes how "the country will bring us no peace" even if they were to go there, because "love itself [is] a flower with roots in a parched ground." Love will not grow in the world, as Williams sees it, whether in the country or otherwise. He points out that both the classical time period in which Marlowe sets his poem and the Renaissance, when Marlowe and Raleigh were writing, were "long ago! / long ago!" He repeats this phrase to emphasize how different things are now given the horrors of his own time period. These earlier time periods may have held some innocence, but his own does not.

Note also that both Marlowe and Raleigh—as well as John Donne, who also wrote a reply to Marlowe's poem during the Renaissance—use iambic pentameter couplets. Williams, by contrast, writes without meter or rhyme, in the free verse mode typical of the twentieth-century. This choice shows that Williams was a man of his time, and it was also typical of his poetry in general. However, the contrast he sets up with the intricately wrought beauty of the poems to which he is responding serves to underline the loss of innocence over time that is the theme of his poem.

"Raleigh Was Right"was William Carlos Williams's response to a poetic duel between Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh that took place in the late sixteenth century. Marlowe had written "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love," a much-anthologized love poem set against the backdrop of a lush, pastoral idyll and in whose famous opening line a shepherd invites the object of his love, a nymph to

"Come live with me and be my love."

Raleigh's rejoinder was "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." Here, Raleigh brings the world of nature that the shepherd inhabits crashing down to earth. The shepherd's pastoral idyll is really no such thing; like any other part of the everyday world, it is subject to the forces of nature and decay. And the shepherd is also himself a part of that world.

In time, his looks will fade. That being the case, why would the nymph want to stay with him? Of course, if he could somehow retain his youth, then she'd be more than happy to oblige. But that can never happen. The shepherd's mortal world is subject to the ravages of time, whereas the nymph's is timeless, young, forever fresh. Between the two worlds there can be no real interaction.

As the title of his poem clearly states, Williams is unequivocally on Raleigh's side in the matter. I would like to suggest that there are two themes at work here, one explicit, the other implicit. The explicit theme takes its cue from Raleigh's poem. Williams is strongly criticizing the notion that nature somehow provides a refuge from the wants and cares of the everyday world. In this, he is reacting not just against the idealized picture of bucolic life presented by Marlowe but also against the conception of nature associated with the Romantics. Romantic poets such as Wordsworth tended to look upon nature as a living force, possessed with its own unique, awesome spirit that somehow transcended the mundane world of space and time. In doing so, they reified nature; that is, they made it into a thing, something standing over, against, and apart from humanity.

But Williams is having none of this. Nature isn't separate and distinct; the country is as much a part of the world as the city. There's nothing remotely mysterious about it; the gods have long since flown, and with them the simple common folk who plowed the soil, tended the land, and planted the crops. They are dead, and so is the world they grimly inhabited. They, like the shepherd in "The Nymph's Reply,"have been destroyed by the violence of time.

That leads me on to the second, more implicit theme of the poem. Williams appears to suggest that the pastoral idyll is no longer a legitimate source of poetic inspiration. Many years ago, perhaps, but not now, not in the modern world. It was all very well in days of yore when the country folk, the common clay, lived off the land. Those were simpler times, a time of "dung and death," to use Eliot's words. It was a time when men and women had a much closer, more intimate connection with the land. It was also a more superstitious time, when every grotto, every vale and tree, seemed possessed by sprites and whispering spirits. Little wonder then that poets waxed lyrical about this animistic fairy world, populating it with long-forgotten pagan deities.

Yes, nature can be beautiful. But it is also an intrinsic part of our world. As such, it can never bring us peace from that world. This applies as much to nature in the here and now as it does to the bucolic fantasies of pastoral poets of old.