A poem that begins with "But" has already missed the start of the argument, and Doug Palmer's piece, dated Oct 25 1966, is content to leave us there. We never learn what "it" is. The opening line, "But if you come up to it," could mean a feeling, a habit, a relationship, or a seed in a flowerpot. That vagueness is deliberate, and it lets the poem make a claim wider than any one case: whatever you nurture, even "with / love and care," will "still grow" beyond what you meant it to be. The single word "still" carries a lot here. It admits that you did everything right and the result stays out of your hands.
The images show the nature of that loss of control. The growth moves through three nouns: "a tree, / a jungle, a hive." A tree is something one person might plant and sit beneath. A jungle is larger, tangled, and indifferent to anyone standing in it. A hive is stranger still, because it means many small lives acting as one, with a hum and a sting of their own. Read this way, the sequence moves from a single plant to a wilderness to a crowded society, and what began in one person's hands ends up with a will of its own. The version we have runs "jungle,a hive" together with no space after the comma, which happens to make the list feel as if it is crowding in.
The form supports this. The poem has fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but there is no rhyme and no regular meter, so it moves as free verse. It splits cleanly into two halves of seven. The first half is about the thing outside you, "it," and the second turns to what happens inside and around "you." Line breaks fall on small, unstressed words: "tend it with," "it will," "for all you do will." Each break makes the reader hesitate on a weak word and then tip forward into the next line, which suits a poem about momentum. The word "will" appears five times, each time predicting the future, and the repetition reads like a verdict. It also sets up a quiet irony, since the poem keeps saying what will happen while insisting that your own will counts for little.
The second half darkens. "There is no recourse to love" is blunt and stripped of ornament. Love, usually offered as the remedy for everything, gives no appeal or escape here. The verbs become more physical: what you do will "thrive in you," and what you "put out" will "grow round you." "Put out" works two ways, since a plant puts out shoots and a person puts out effort, but it also has the sense of extinguishing, which adds a faint unease. Growth first happens inside you, then surrounds you, so you end up enclosed by your own actions like someone in a thicket. Earlier the hand "near upon it" is said not to be "the same forth." The phrasing is clipped and a little broken, as if the grammar itself had been changed by the touch it describes. I read it as saying that tending something alters the tender permanently.
The ending is the strangest line: "the wind will at last / whistle your lips." Ordinarily you whistle, but here the wind does it to you. It is the poem's last reversal of agency, and the soft "w" sounds of "wind," "will," and "whistle" make it sound like breath. The image suggests a person turned into a pipe or reed, hollowed out and played by something larger. "At last" gives it the finality of old age or death, though the poem does not say so outright.
Significance is partly a matter of the title, "Poems Written Out of William Carlos Williams 3." It points to a debt to Williams and suggests a numbered series, and the plain diction and short, enjambed lines are consistent with that, though I am inferring this from the text. "Written out of" also has a nice double meaning in a poem about growth: the poem seems to have grown out of another writer's example and, like the tree and the hive, to have become something with its own life. What lasts is the compression. In fourteen short lines, with no named object and no moral spelled out, Palmer leaves readers to find their own "it" and to feel how little of it they can control.