and every each day every each and every day
Repetition becomes rhythm, and rhythm becomes ritual. The phrase loops like breath—steady, unpunctuated, unrelenting. It’s not rhyme that drives it, but cadence. A pulse. A heartbeat.
Compare this to William Carlos Williams’s iconic stanza from “The Red Wheelbarrow”:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Both poems resist ornament. Both lean into imagist poetry, where clarity and structure replace metaphor. Williams’s lines break deliberately, isolating each image. Ours repeats deliberately, isolating each moment. The wheelbarrow is glazed with rain; our days are glazed with sameness, with devotion, with return.
Place this line beside William Carlos Williams's approach to repetition and accumulation—his famous insistence on "no ideas but in things"—and something sparks. Williams built his imagist poetry around the concrete, the immediate, the relentlessly present. He understood that meaning arrives not through abstraction but through the physical weight of words as they land, one after another.
Williams believed in “No ideas but in things”—a cornerstone of WCW Imagism and Objectivism. He wrote what he saw. But what if he had written “and every each day every each and every day”? Perhaps he’d be watching a nurse’s hands fold linens, or a child’s footsteps tracing the same sidewalk. Perhaps he’d be thinking about time—not as abstraction, but as repetition. As presence.
Technically, both poems use minimal vocabulary to evoke maximum feeling. Williams’s nouns are tactile: wheelbarrow, rainwater, chickens. Ours are temporal: day, each, every. His poem is spatial; ours is temporal. Yet both are observational, spiritual, and quietly romantic.
Rhythm as Ritual
The Say Still line operates through deliberate redundancy: and every each day every each and every day. Read it aloud. The rhythm stutters, circles back, insists. "Every" appears four times. "Each" appears three times. "Day" bookends the phrase. This isn't careless repetition—it's architectural.
Williams did similar work in his verse, returning to images, sounds, and syntactic structures until they became incantatory. His wheelbarrow didn't just sit there; it depended. His plums weren't just cold; they were so sweet. He knew that repetition transforms observation into revelation.
What Each Word Carries
Consider "every"—totalizing, absolute, democratic. Then "each"—particular, singular, intimate. Together they create tension: the universal and the specific folding into one another. "Day" grounds everything in time's most fundamental unit, the experience we all share and all endure differently.
If William Carlos Williams had written and every each day every each and every day, he might have been watching morning light hit the same kitchen table for the thousandth time, finding both monotony and miracle in the repetition. His Imagism and Objectivism taught him that the ordinary, when attended to with precision, becomes extraordinary.
Worldviews in Echo
Both approaches share an observational intensity—a refusal to look away from what recurs. How William Carlos Williams changed American poetry was partly through this democratic attention: everything matters if you look closely enough. Say Still's line extends this philosophy into the realm of temporal experience itself, making visible how days accumulate and blur and insist.
The final meaning? That belongs to you, the reader. Perhaps it's exhaustion. Perhaps devotion. Perhaps both at once—the way living feels when you're paying attention.
your words mean all my heart needs to be