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Play

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) · Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems · 1921

Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am,
by what devious means do you contrive
to remain idle? Teach me, O master.

Where this text comes from

First published in Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (1921). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/william-carlos-williams_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (6)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31878
https://archive.org/details/temperscarlos00willrich
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51997
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006060238
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35667
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007676947

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L3.

Cite this poem

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). “Play.” First published in Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (1921). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/william-carlos-williams/play/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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