Today’s Poem: Spring and All
William Carlos Williams forms a poem
Nothing says spring quite like a careful description of driving a car to the hospital.
Or so, at least, decided William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) when he opened Spring and All, his 1923 collection of poetry and prose, with the lines, “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue . . . ”
For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.
The question is what those modernists have to teach us that hasn’t already been absorbed and over-used in the current stripped-down poetic prose that is the dominant American climate of free verse. And the key is perhaps in the way Williams uses free verse as a form.
Williams opens his 1923 collection with the season of his book’s title, Spring and All. The most famous part of the book is the 22nd section, which contains Williams’s heavily anthologized poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But the first section of Spring and All is what we need to consider, for it captures something essential about his craft.
A medical doctor in Paterson, New Jersey, Williams gives us an image of spring as what comes into view while driving on the road to a hospital. First he sees the broad strokes: the sky, the muddy fields, “patches of standing water / the scattering of tall trees.” But then the rush of details emerges in the spring, like the quick flashes of vision from a moving car: “the reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees.” The language become the language of birth as “It quickens.”
It’s hard to image a more accurate description of spring, filling in the details, than Williams’s line “One by one objects are defined.” What we see rushing past as we drive in a car becomes the image of spring’s rapid blossoming. And he concludes with the promise of fullness: “the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken.”
This flashing scenery, in sharp particular observations rapidly replacing one another, works not just as an image for the spring but as an example of William Carlos Williams’s free verse as a form of poetry. In “Spring and All” the rush of words matches the rush of landscape seen from a car, to give us the rush of wakening spring.
Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]
by William Carlos Williams
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines — Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches — They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind — Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined — It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance — Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken
