Most poems about willpower flatter it. William Dickey's "Will" does the opposite: it sets the will loose in a room full of gin and small talk and lets us watch it make a fool of itself. The poem's central claim is deflating and oddly tender. Will cannot exist on its own; it "has to find / something unyielding enough / to push against." Without resistance, it is nothing, and when resistance is withheld, it invents a grandeur to cover the gap.
The opening stanzas treat will almost as an animal with an appetite. "A woman or a wall" is the poem's first joke and its first insight: to will, the two are interchangeable, so long as each is "made terse / with interior refusal." That phrase is wonderfully compressed. "Terse" is usually a word for speech, so the refusal here is a kind of clipped silence, a closed face. Will feeds on that silence, which is why the poem calls it "will's meat." The word is physical and a little predatory, and it reduces the lofty abstraction to a carnivore looking for a meal.
Then comes a social comedy. This will is "likeably uninvolved / at cocktail parties," a figure who seems harmless until "the gin's done" and he begins to proclaim himself a "monument of granite" walking "on stone feet." The speech is drunken bombast, and the poem lets its logic wobble gloriously: the earth "sinks / sensibly beneath / my power of conclusion." "Sensibly" is the sly word, since the ground gives way not because it must but because it is being polite, and "power of conclusion" is pompous in the way only a tipsy man's phrasing can be. Notice, too, that the boast simply echoes the wall from the first stanza. Will imagines itself as the very thing it needs to push against, the unyielding granite, as if it could be both force and obstacle at once.
The second half tests that fantasy. "Take only an eye," the poem says, and offers a soft alternative: a pond "fringed / with elaborate cresses," with "rumors of kohl, / billets-doux, soft / acceptances mentioned." The imagery here is delicate and slightly ornate, all eye makeup and love notes, a world of invitation rather than refusal. The phrasing is hedged too, with "rumors" and "mentioned" keeping everything at the level of hearsay. This is what yielding looks like, and will wants none of it. It "turns away, wry / as a bent-necked bird / at the wrong water." The simile is exact and a little comic: a bird that has come to drink and found the water unsuitable, its crooked neck suggesting both fastidiousness and awkwardness.
What follows is the poem's most striking move. Refusing the soft pond, will "sips alkali instead," drinking bitter, caustic stuff, and "founds its own oasis / where the gaze chafes, / in mica desert." The landscape hardens into glittering, flaky, abrasive stone, and the gaze, which was a pond a moment ago, now rubs raw. Will would rather found a self-made oasis in a hostile place than accept an offered one. The closing toast, "I, of the oppositions, / drink to fulfillment," completes the parallel with the earlier cry. Both speeches begin with a grand "I," but the second has a quieter irony. Fulfillment, for this will, means the continued presence of opposition, so it is toasting its own thirst.
Formally, the poem is built from short, unrhymed three-line stanzas, and the free movement suits a subject that resists tidy closure. The line breaks do real work, as when "wry" dangles at the end of a line before the bird arrives, or when "soft" is stranded before "acceptances." The two italic-free speeches, each introduced by "cries," bracket the poem like a pair of drunken proclamations, one boastful, one bitterly triumphant.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to either worship or condemn will. It diagnoses a psychology: the kind of person who mistakes difficulty for meaning and cannot trust ease. The poem leaves us amused and a little uneasy, because the figure at the cocktail party is not entirely a stranger.