Approach of Winter

Analyzing Williams’s poem seems to threaten the poem’s very premise. At just 47 words, and those words, simple constructs of one or two syllables, not even managing to find their way to a complete sentence, the poem defies the excessive breadth of typical extended analysis, analysis that sometimes distracts from the poem’s insistence that suggestion is more powerful than explanation, subtlety more revealing than elucidation, feeling more persuasive than intellect.

The poet says in all but words: Here is an image I snatched from the sort of landscape that you regularly pass through but seldom notice; here is an image I felt. See it, feel it, or don’t. Or even better—don’t see mine but go out, eyes open, and see your own. In a poem that suggests more than it reveals and reveals more than it explains, the work of analysis is akin to ancient astronomers making sense of constellations. The poet here gives us six unrelated images: trees; wind; some leaves still on the branches; other leaves scattered on the ground below; a bare garden; and a border of still vibrant plants that edge it. Constellate away, he urges.

The images are themselves unrelated save that they share the same visual field of the poem.