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William Street Summary & Analysis
by Kenneth Slessor

William Street Summary & Analysis
by Kenneth Slessor

  • Introduction
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
  • Symbols
  • Poetic Devices
  • Vocabulary & References
  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
  • Download PDF
  • Download Teacher Edition
  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “William Street”

The Full Text of “William Street”

  • “William Street” Introduction

    • Kenneth Slessor's "William Street," included in the poet's 1939 collection Five Bells: XX Poems, finds the beauty in urban grunge and chaos. The speaker vividly describes the sights, smells, and sounds of William Street, a major road in Sydney, Australia, that was once a notorious site of poverty, nightclubs, and prostitution. While admitting that the reader might find such an environment "ugly," the speaker finds its energy and authenticity "lovely."

  • “William Street” Summary

    • The speaker describes how the neon lights of William Street look on a rainy night. A circle of red light, green light the color of liquor, and flashing arrows reflect off the ground, as though spreading flames across the pavement. The wet street is like a deep river of light. While some people might find this repulsive, the speaker thinks it's beautiful.

      Empty pants hang on display in pawn-shop windows like dead men, one pair knocking knees with another. Now that no one's wearing these pants, they're free from suffering or judgment. While some people might find this repulsive, the speaker thinks it's beautiful.

      The air is filled with the intense, scratchy smells of cigarette smoke, animal fat, and fish; with the smell of kerosene oil, which makes people's noses scrunch up in disgust; with the smell and hiss of onions cooking in hot grease. While some people might find this repulsive, the speaker thinks it's beautiful.

      The drunks and sex workers, with their flippant attitudes and glassy-eyed stares, who are near death and almost starving, roam the pavements of this urban meadow. While some people might find this repulsive, the speaker thinks it's beautiful.

  • “William Street” Themes

    • Theme The Intense Beauty of City Life

      The Intense Beauty of City Life

      Kenneth Slessor's "William Steet" celebrates city life, finding beauty even in its supposed ugliness. The poem, inspired by the William Street of 1930s Sydney, Australia, vividly depicts the sights, sounds, and smells of a busy urban area. The speaker acknowledges that some might find this scene to be frightening, seedy, and unforgiving. To the speaker, however, it's "lovely"—perhaps because it's a more authentic reflection of human suffering and desire.

      The speaker has a point to prove, addressing an unspecified "You" throughout the poem who presumably represents someone with typical attitudes about the city. Most people, the poem suggests, would find a place like William Street "ugly"; they'd prefer a cleaner, safer, more sanitized environment, or, perhaps, the more traditional beauty of the natural world.

      The speaker does admit that William Street is a pretty bleak place, filled with poverty, suffering, and danger. For example, "pawn-shop windows" display second-hand trousers like "hung men," their empty presence a reminder of their previous owners' absence. Given that Slessor wrote this poem in the 1930s, these ghostly trousers perhaps once belonged to men who died or had to sell everything they owned during the Great Depression. The street is also home to glassy-eyed alcoholics ("dips") and sex workers ("molls"), who are always one stumble away from death or starvation.

      In brief sketches like these, the poem hints at a backdrop of misery behind the flashy lights. And yet, the speaker finds this urban world—so seemingly terrible on paper—to be "lovely." That's because, the poem implies, William Street is utterly unfiltered and thrilling. The reflection of glaring neon lights on the wet pavement is like a "running fire" spreading across "the stones," frightening yet remarkably vivid and alive. Likewise, the "rich and rasping" smells of cigarette smoke, fish, paraffin lamps, and onions being fried in grease fill the air. While not traditionally pleasant, these scents are undeniably intense. If nothing else, then, William Street is captivating and unignorable.

      But the poem implies that it's not just the sensory stimuli that make William Street "lovely" in the speaker's eyes. The glaring neon lights and garish advertisements (e.g., those "pulsing arrows") "go deeper than a stream," the speaker says, suggesting that they're more meaningful, evocative, and revealing about modern life than a pastoral scene could ever be. That is, the speaker senses some sort of deep truth in this urban scene about what it means to be human.

      Perhaps that's because the city doesn't sugarcoat or gloss over human hardship. On the contrary, suffering and desire on William Street are all out in the open, existing side-by-side with the rich sensory delights on offer. It's this honesty, it seems, that the speaker so admires.

      Where this theme appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-16

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “William Street”

    • Lines 1-4

      The red globe ...
      ... find it lovely.

      As the title reveals, the setting here is William Street, a real location in Sydney, Australia, that, at the time Slessor wrote the poem, was a site of poverty, prostitution, and crime. Slessor said that "William Street" is:

      [...] a sort of flashlight photograph of the swarming city channel that runs up the hill to Kings Cross, taken on a rainy night when the surface of the road is coated with a slick of reds and greens and whites reflected from the neon skysigns (the "red globes" and "pulsing arrows").

      Readers don't need to know anything about the real William Street to picture this setting, however, thanks to the speaker's vivid imagery. This opening stanza focuses on the bright lights of this urban world:

      • The mention of red light subtly alludes to red-light districts, so named for the traditional red light used to signify brothels.
      • The garish "liquor green" perhaps stems from traffic lights or more of those "skysigns."
      • The "pulsing arrows" perhaps refer to the neon "Dunlop Tyre" sign, or to some other business's advertisement.
      • The "running fire" might refer the lights of cars or trams that illuminate the surface of the road, cigarette ash as it hits the pavement, and/or the reflection of all these neon signs on the wet ground. Notice how the alliteration of "spilt on the stones" has a hissing, fire-like sound that matches the image.

      This imagery is at once immediate and alienating; readers can picture the stark colors of this nighttime scene but it's not entirely clear where they're coming from. The scene thus feels impressionistic, like a confusing, thrilling burst of light and color. It's as though this world moves so rapidly that its colors can't quite be pinned down.

      In the poem's third line, the speaker declares that all these lights "go deeper than a stream." This comparison juxtaposes the city and the natural world, finding more heft in the "stream" of all those lights. "Deeper" suggests that, for the speaker, William Street is less superficial than a pleasant but meaningless pastoral scene. The shapes and impressions of the street—the bold redness of the light, the pulsating motion of the arrows, the continuous stream of fire-like reflections—reveal something "deeper" about humanity and life.

      Line 4 summarizes the poem's main idea (which becomes a refrain at the end of each stanza): "You find this ugly, I find it lovely." This antithesis suggests that most people—the collective "You" the speaker addresses—find places like William Street to be both aesthetically and morally repulsive. The speaker, by contrast, finds beauty in the urban scene, implicitly because it's "deeper," more meaningful and moving, than a simple, natural scene. The asyndeton in the phrase—the lack of an "and"—makes the contrast all the more striking.

      Finally, the poem uses a loose iambic pentameter and a subtle ABAC rhyme scheme in each quatrain. Iambic pentameter means that each line contains five iambs, poetic feet that consist of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM).

      On one level, this bouncy meter and rhyme make the poem feel like a jaunty stroll down the street. The rhymes are slant, however ("green"/"stream"), and this meter is quite unsteady. Just look at how many variations appear in the first three lines:

      The red globe | of light, | the li- | quor green,
      the pul- | sing ar- | rows and | the run- | ning fire
      spilt       on | the stones, | go deep- | er than | a stream;

      There's some steady music in the background that evokes the hum of city life, yet the poem still feels chaotic and unpredictable.

    • Lines 5-8

      Ghosts' trousers, like ...
      ... find it lovely.

    • Lines 9-12

      Smells rich and ...
      ... find it lovely.

    • Lines 13-16

      The dips and ...
      ... find it lovely.

  • “William Street” Symbols

    • Symbol The Trousers

      The Trousers

      In the poem's second stanza, the speaker describes trousers on display "in paw-shop-windows." These trousers symbolize the suffering and economic hardship of the Great Depression, which was a time of rampant unemployment and poverty.

      A pawnshop is a store where people offer up their belongings as collateral for loans. It works like this: a person brings an item to a pawn shop in exchange for money, and the pawnbroker then holds onto that item until the money is returned. If the person can't or decides not to repay the loan, the shop will simply sell their item to other customers.

      The trousers, then, suggest desperation and despair. Their former owners were presumably in such dire need of food, rent money, etc. that they had to sell their own clothing. In saying that they belong to "Ghosts," the speaker suggests that the men who pawned these pants are either literally dead or have become mere phantoms of their former selves in the absence of a steady job. That is, they've lost their sense of purpose and dignity.

      The way the trousers "dangle" in the window makes them look like the bodies of hanged men, further strengthening their symbolic link with suffering. Now, though, the pants are empty; there are no human beings to "suffer or condemn"—to fill them with despair and self-loathing.

      Where this symbol appears in the poem:
      • Lines 5-7: “Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men, / in  pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee, / but none inside to suffer or condemn;”

  • “William Street” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      "William Street" uses alliteration to bring its evocative imagery to life on the page. Alliteration—along with the related devices consonance, sibilance, and assonance—makes the sights and the smells of William street more vivid and intense.

      Listen to the alliteration in the first stanza, for example:

      The red globe of light, the liquor green,
      [...]
      spilt on the stones, go deeper than a stream;

      The flurry of repeated sounds evokes the chaotic, swirling mass of lights. Shared sounds also create the impression that all these lights are bleeding together, as in long-exposure photography.

      The alliteration gets even louder in the third stanza:

      Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish
      and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,

      The rush of sounds conveys just how overwhelming the smells of the street are. The consonance and sibilance within words add to the effect ("rasping," "puffs of paraffin," "crimp").

      In the poem's final stanza, /h/ alliteration of "hunger at their heels" draws readers' attention to the fact that the people of William Street are engaged in a constant struggle to survive. The breathiness of that /h/ sounds even suggests the breathlessness with which these "dips and molls" try to outrun their hunger. These people roam "the pavements of their pasturage," the speaker says, alliteration again adding emphasis to an important image in the poem: the urban jungle as a "pasturage," or grazing ground, for society's less fortunate.

      Where alliteration appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “globe,” “light,” “liquor,” “green”
      • Line 3: “spilt,” “stones,” “stream”
      • Line 9: “Smells,” “rich,” “rasping,” “smoke,” “fat,” “fish”
      • Line 10: “puffs,” “paraffin”
      • Line 14: “hunger,” “heels”
      • Lines 15-15: “p / avements”
      • Line 15: “pasturage”

    • Imagery

    • Antithesis

    • Polysyndeton

    • Repetition

    • Sibilance

  • "William Street" Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • William Street
    • Dangle of hung men
    • Pawn-shop
    • Rasping
    • Paraffin
    • Crimp
    • Dips and Molls
    • Flip
    • Ranging
    • Pasturage
    • (Location in poem: )

      A road in Sydney, Australia, once infamous for its poverty, crime, and prostitution.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “William Street”

    • Form

      "William Street" consists of four quatrains (a.k.a. four-line stanzas). Each quatrain is like a self-contained snapshot of a different part of this world: the first stanza focuses on the bright lights; the second on "pawn-shop windows"; the third on "rich and rasping smells"; and the fourth on the "dips and molls" (alcoholics and sex workers) who roam the street.

      This steady, episodic structure suggests that the speaker takes all of this in stride (other city poems, for example, might have wildly different stanza lengths to reflect the chaos of the urban environment).

      The poem is also structured around its refrain, as each stanza ends with (almost) the same sentence:

      You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

      The speaker assumes that most people wouldn't like William Street all that much, given that it's such a far cry from the peaceful pastoral scenes often praised in poetry. In a way, then this poem can be read as a kind of anti-pastoral, or as an urban pastoral—an appreciation of what people usually consider ugly over the more traditional beauty of the natural world.

    • Meter

      "William Street" uses iambic pentameter, but it's very loose.

      A line of iambic pentameter contains five iambs, poetic feet that consist of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM). Here's line 13 for an example of this meter in action:

      The dips | and molls, | with flip | and shi- | ny gaze

      While most of the lines here stick to 10 syllables or so, the iambic rhythm changes quite a bit. Take like 5:

      Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men,

      Metrical variations like this keep the poem from feeling too strict or rigid. William Street, as presented here, is an intense, chaotic place, so it makes sense that Slessor played with the meter so much. There's an underlying iambic pulse to the poem that evokes the humming energy of city life, yet there are also plenty of unpredictable moments bursting through and disrupting this rhythm.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "William Street" follows the rhyme scheme ABAC. In other words, the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme, while the second and fourth don't.

      Here's stanza 1:

      [...] green, A
      [...] fire B
      [...] stream; A
      [...] lovely. C

      This pattern lends the poem some casual music. At the same time, notice that the rhymes are all slant: green/stream, men/condemn, fish/hiss, gaze/pasturage. As a result, the poem's music feels slightly off-kilter. This subtly reflects the speaker's point: urban life might not be traditionally "lovely" (it lacks clean, clear, perfect rhymes) but the speaker takes pleasure in it nonetheless.

  • “William Street” Speaker

    • Readers don't learn anything about the first-person speaker of "William Street" apart from the fact that they find city life, with all its garish lights and smells, beautiful. The speaker feels different from an unnamed "You," who likely represents society more broadly. "You" don't like the city, finding its grime, chaos, and poverty "ugly" and distasteful. The speaker, by contrast, is able to see the beauty of urban life. They find William Street to be an enthralling, sensuous, and above all "lovely" place (as they state repeatedly in the poem's refrain).

      Because the poem keeps its characters general, readers might find themselves identifying more with the speaker or with the "You" they set themselves against.

  • “William Street” Setting

    • The poem is set, of course, on "William Street." This is a real place in Sydney, Australia. Now a business district, the area was once marked by crime and poverty. The poem is also likely set in the 1930s when Slessor wrote it; the mention of trousers hanging in a pawn shop window nods to the realities of the Great Depression, which left millions out of work and desperate for income.

      That said, the poem itself never mentions William Street by name, and its description city could apply to any number of urban streets that are filled with bright lights, seedy storefronts, and nose-crinkling smells.

      The poem more specifically takes place on a rainy night, when the garish light from neon street signs bounces off the wet pavement, the smells of smoke and cooking fill the air, and "dips and molls" (alcoholics and sex workers) roam "their pasturage"—the urban meadow where they graze for booze and clientele. The mention of dips and molls, like the mention of pawned trousers, nods to the darker side of city life. Some inhabitants of this world are struggling to survive from one moment to the next, barely one step ahead of "death" and "hunger."

      Still, the speaker finds beauty in the street's intensity and chaos. This is perhaps because the street is filled with vivid and authentic life. The mention of "pasturage" also adds to the poem's subtle juxtaposition between the city and the countryside, a more traditionally beautiful environment that's often praised in poetry. The lights of William Street "go deeper than a stream," however, implying that they evoke something in the speaker that nature never could.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “William Street”

    • Literary Context

      "William Street" was published in Kenneth Slessor's 1939 collection Five Bells: XX poems. Slessor (1901-1971) was one of Australia's most influential poets, particularly known for helping to steer his nation's poetry away from "bush ballads" (a genre of poetry that depicted life in undeveloped parts of Australia in simple, rhyming verse) and toward modernism.

      Modernism was a broad cultural, philosophical, and artistic movement that arose in response to the rapid technological shifts of the late 19th/early 20th centuries as well as the horrors of World War I. Modernist poets rejected the strict formalism and aesthetic ideals of the past. They instead wrote using looser meters or outright free verse and turned away from the Romantic focus on the sublime beauty of the natural world. Australian modernism began later than American and European modernism, but it was in full swing when Slessor wrote this poem.

      While bush poets like Banjo Peters and Henry Lawson (who wrote his own, far less celebratory "William Street") tended to equate rural life with Australian identity, Slessor's "William Street" presents city life as equally rich, varied, and valuable. And with its evocative urban imagery and subversion of the pastoral tradition (i.e., poetry that celebrated the peaceful beauty of the countryside), "William Street" is in keeping with modernism's mantra to "make it new."

      Historical Context

      William Street is a real place in Sydney, Australia. Nowadays, it's part of the city's business district. But when Slessor wrote this poem in the 1930s, it was known as a place of poverty, crime, and various vices. It was also the center of Sydney's automobile trade; the "pulsing arrows" in line 2 are most likely part of the neon Dunlop Tyres sign looming over the road.

      It's also worth remembering that Slessor wrote this poem towards the end of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn the modern world had ever seen. The Depression began in the U.S. with the massive stock market crash of 1929 but quickly sent shockwaves around the world. Australia was hit particularly badly because its economy was heavily reliant on exports. And while the 1920s had been a period of post-war growth and prosperity for Sydney, the Depression brought this to a grinding halt. The dangling "ghosts' trousers" in this poem, implied to have been pawned by men who were out of work and in need of money, are a nod to the stark economic realities of the Depression.

  • More “William Street” Resources

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