The Desert Music and Other Poems was a 1954 Random House book collecting 1949-54 poems by the American modernist poet/writer William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

. It is now collected, along with Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems is a 1962 book of poems by the American modernist poet/writer William Carlos Williams. It was Williams's final book, for which he posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1963....

(1962) and Journey to Love

Journey to Love (William Carlos Williams)

Journey to Love was a 1955 Random House book by the American modernist poet/writer William Carlos Williams. He dedicated it to his wife. All of the poems are in triadic stanza form, sometimes "with a short fourth line to fill out the measure."...

(1955), in the New Directions paperback Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems 1950-1962.

table of contents

• "The Descent"
• "To Daphne and Virginia"
• "The Orchestra"
• "For Eleanor and Bill Monahan"
• "To a Dog Injured in the Street"
• "The Yellow Flower"
• "The Host"
• "Deep Religious Faith"
• "The Mental Hospital Garden"
• "The Artist"
• "Theocritus: Idyl I"
• "The Desert Music"

Except for the title poem, all the pieces here are in triadic stanza form (with slight exceptions), as in the opening of "The Descent":

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even

Parts of "Theocritus: Idyl I" and "The Orchestra" were used in The Desert Music

The Desert Music

The Desert Music is a work of music for voices and orchestra composed by Steve Reich based on texts by William Carlos Williams. It consists of five movements, and in both its tempi and arrangement of thematic material, the piece is in a characteristic arch form...

, a composition for chorus and orchestra or voices and ensemble by Minimalist composer Steve Reich

Steve Reich

Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...

in 1984.