The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

The image contrasts fragility with apparent permanence: small violets, through persistence and natural force, can split mountain rock. Read as a metaphor, it suggests that gentle or marginalized forces—beauty, tenderness, desire, art, or hope—can outlast and even transform what seems immovable (social convention, brutality, despair). In a Williamsian key, the line resonates with his recurring faith in vulnerable sensibility confronting hard realities: the delicate is not merely crushed by the hard; it can also, over time, fracture it. The sentence’s calm certainty (“have broken”) gives the metaphor the weight of an observed truth rather than a wish.