“Love Poem with Toast” (2008) is a short poem by the American poet Miller Williams, published by LSU Press in the collection titled Time and the Tilting Earth. Highly representative of Williams’s style, the poem touches on “grand” subjects such as love, death, and desire in a casual, conversational, and at times humorous tone. Williams weaves together various American and English poetic traditions to take the reader into the mind of a speaker ruminating on the nature of human wants and desires, all while sitting across the table from their lover eating toast.

Like much of Williams’s poetry, “Love Poem with Toast” finds a home somewhere between Modernist and Contemporary American poetry. His irregular use of rhyme and lack of meter, for instance, is a form of free verse that traces back to Walt Whitman, the so-called “Father of American Free Verse.” Instead of adhering to a strict form, Williams creates his own rhythm in the poem by making use of poetic devices such as repetition, assonance, and anaphora (see Literary Devices) that give the poem a natural musicality. Furthermore, and much like Whitman, Williams takes American people and everyday events and situations as his subject matter; “Love Poem with Toast” centers a routine breakfast scene to underscore the quotidian.

As Williams’s work spans several generations, it is difficult to align him with one poetic movement or genre. Readers connect most with Williams’s ability to capture honest observations about the lives and sentiments of regular, everyday Americans and to write about life, death, love, beauty, and other major ideas in a poetic but easily understandable way. “Love Poem with Toast,” written towards the end of Williams’s career, is a perfect example of this down-to-earth yet deceptive style.

With touches of humor, irony, existentialism, and surprising musicality, “Love Poem with Toast” ponders the nature of human wants, and though the speaker leans toward a certain philosophy (existentialism), the last stanza concludes not with a solution to our human desires but with the introduction of another problem—“we gaze across the table and pretend” (Line 24)—the lovers’ inability to communicate their wants and desires to each other and the stalemate of pretending that things are all right.

While the poem can be interpreted darkly, there is a certain ambivalence to the wanting expressed by the poem’s speaker. The speaker objectively considers what and why people want and implies how wanting is often useless because people often want things that are beyond their control. But the poem can also be read as testament to the strength and beauty of humanity. Humankind can desire things beyond which they can control or even understand. Ultimately, the poem is a love poem, and the concluding stanza is about our desire to love each other until death and potentially beyond it.

Poet Biography

Miller Williams (1930-2015) was an American poet, editor, and translator born in Hoxie, Arkansas. As one of the most prominent poets of the post-World War II era, Williams published 14 collections of poetry and was the author, editor, or translator of over 30 books throughout his career. He also enjoyed an extensive teaching career at Loyola University in New Orleans and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he taught English, comparative literature, and foreign languages for 33 years while contributing heavily to running the University’s nationally recognized creative writing and translation programs.

Williams’s father was a Methodist minister, and his mother was a civil rights activist. His family moved frequently when he was growing up. In several interviews, Williams claims that although he entered college to study English and foreign languages, a language test determined he had “absolutely no aptitude in the handling of words.” Therefore, he quickly changed his majors to the hard sciences to avoid “embarrassing” his parents.

In 1951, Williams graduated from Arkansas State University with a bachelor’s degree in biology, and soon after earned a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Arkansas. In 1951, he also married Lucille Day and had three children, one of which was Lucinda Williams, who would become a Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter. For the decade that followed, Williams taught biology at small schools in the south before a recommendation from writer Flannery O’Connor landed him a job at Louisiana State University in the English Department.

Four years later, he secured another position at Loyola University in New Orleans, where in 1968 he helped found and edit the New Orleans Review, a prestigious American literary journal that runs to this day. In 1970, he returned to teach in the English department and the graduate creative writing program at the University of Arkansas. Beyond mentoring future poets, one of which included former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Miller authored and edited numerous volumes of poetry and literary criticism, and he translated such notable poets as Pablo Neruda, Giuseppe Belli, and Nicanor Parra.

In 1996, Williams became the third US Inaugural poet to read at an inauguration (inaugural poets were and still are a relatively new addition to inaugurations, with only Robert Frost and Maya Angelou preceding Williams). Williams read at fellow Arkansas-native Bill Clinton’s second swearing-in as president. His poem, “Of History and Hope,” made him known to a wider audience throughout America and the world.

Williams was and continues to be enjoyed by many readers for his honesty, imagination, musicality, and accessibility. He tackled grand, philosophical subjects, like the Modernist poets before him, but he avoided abstractions and flowery language. He was a keen observer of the American character, and he was also dedicated to reaching an audience beyond the classroom and poetry lovers. Williams’s favorite review of his work was by a critic who called him “the Hank Williams of poetry” and said that, although his poetry is “taught at Princeton and Harvard, it’s read and understood by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers” (“Miller Williams.” Poetry Foundation. 16 Oct. 2021).

Like Walt Whitman, Williams chose the ordinary lives of Americans for material, often using dialogue and dramatic monologue to portray the American voice in his poetry. His background in biology and upbringing in small-town, rural America also gave him an interest in nature and science, and he claimed his poems had “taken much of their substance from the gristle and thew of the sciences” (“Miller Williams (1930-2015).” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 2020. 16 Oct. 2021).

Williams’s work spans several generations and movements in American poetry. Some of his major works include Imperfect Love (1986), Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (1989) Adjusting to the Light (1992), The Ways We Touch (1997), Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems (1999), and Time and Tilting Earth: Poems (2008). He is also the author of Making a Poem: Some thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It (2006).

Over the course of his lifetime, Williams won many awards, including the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in Poetry from Harvard University, the Prix de Rome for Literature, and the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009, he received the Porter Lifetime Achievement Award.

On January 1, 2015, Miller Williams died from complications from Alzheimer’s disease. The University of Arkansas Library holds a Special Collections archive of his writings and papers.

Poem Text

Williams, Miller. “Love Poem with Toast.” 1999. Library of Congress.

Summary

The poet opens by making a general statement about human beings, saying “some of what we do, we do / to make things happen” (Lines 1-2). In other words, we take actions and expect a reaction from them. The speaker gives examples like setting an “alarm” to wake up in the morning, drinking “coffee” for energy (Line 3), and turning the key to start the car (Line 4). These are routine things many people do every day.

Stanza 2 takes a darker turn. In Line 5 and 6, the poet claims, “the rest of what we do” is to prevent things from happening, including “the skin from aging” and the tools from getting rusty (Line 7). These things are more related to the passage of time and the inevitability of death. They are things we have little or no control over, and yet still we try to prevent them from happening. In the last line of Stanza 2, the poet writes that we also try to suppress “the truth from getting out” (Line 8). The implication is that the truth will always get out, just like the skin will always wrinkle and the hoe will always rust with age.

In the third stanza, the poet writes, “With a yes and no like the poles of a battery” (Line 9), meaning that, by deciding between the things we can and can’t control, we “move, as we call it, forward” (Line 11). There is a touch of irony in this line, for if we are moving “forward,” we are only moving “forward” towards aging and death. Time is passing and most things, including our very selves, are deteriorating.

In Line 12, the poet begins to list things people want, such as the desire to be “wanted.” The list fluctuates between big, universal wants such as “wanting not to lose the rain forest” (Line 13) and “wanting not to have cancer” (Line 15) to smaller, more familiar wants—“wanting the water to boil” (Line 14) and “wanting to be home by dark” (Line 16). The variety within Williams’s list implies that many people’s wants and desires are subconscious and perhaps not well thought-out. Interestingly, the poem itself could be an attempt to do some of that thinking.

In the fourth and final stanza, the tone changes and the poem becomes more focused around the nature of love. Williams writes, “as each of us wants the other / watching at the end” (Lines 18-19). In other words, we all want someone to be with us when we die. Then, “as both want not to leave the other alone / as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone” (Lines 20-21)—meaning we don’t want to leave each other alone and we even seek a spiritual love that transcends death. But although we want these things, the poet concludes somewhat enigmatically, instead “we gaze across breakfast and pretend” (Line 22).

The final stanza even incorporates end-rhymes (“end,” “pretend,” “alone,” “bone”) for the first time in the poem, mimicking the ABBA rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet. The mention of eating breakfast in the final line circles back to the title and provides a clear setting in which we can assume the speaker’s thoughts have occurred. The poem ends somewhat puzzlingly, as Williams neglects to give any sort of answer or commentary on our seemingly useless and possibly endless list of desires. Instead, the poet concludes by revealing what the characters do—with all of their wants and desires floating around in their heads and hearts, they simply “gaze across breakfast and pretend” (Line 22).