After moving out of his parents' home (less than half a mile away), Williams found his various selves (poet, doctor, suburban dweller) firmly attached to a home of his own and the institution of marriage. During his middle years, Williams's poetry reflects his satisfaction with married life. As he notes in the third of “Three Sonnets” (CP2, 73–4), his wife becomes all women: “In the one woman / I find all the rest – or nothing.” Even though there may be times at which he considers certain attractions outside the bounds of marriage (as we see in his dalliance with another woman in “Eternity” [CP2, 76–8]), he stays within those bounds.

The early years of the marriage were a different story. After settling down with Flossie, Williams composed over the next few years a series of poems about the frustrations of marriage – especially his own – and the potential consequences of breaking free. Many of these poems appeared in little magazines, and a good number of them were collected in his early volumes, particularly in Sour Grapes. We can begin our discussion with a poem that, though frequently anthologized, Williams himself waited twenty-two years to reprint in The Complete Collected Poems (1938) after its first publication in Others (December 1916): “The Young Housewife.” There are – as we shall see – dimensions to the poem that suggest reasons why Williams so long deferred its next appearance.