Approach of Winter

The form in “Approach to Winter” is more organic and subversive than form in traditional poems. Williams offers 11 lines, none made up of more than five words, each line with varying length. The poem thus creates a contradiction that was before Whitman (one of Williams’s most important influences) inconceivable in poetry: a deliberately conceived, carefully executed, and entirely haphazard form.

The irregular form invites creative speculation in ways that more conventional forms do not. In a poem that looks at the vulnerability of nature as winter approaches, what better way to approximate that helplessness than to put a short poem on a page overwhelmed by dead white space. The lines move out and move back with irregular energy, like the brittle branches of trees being moved to and fro by the late fall wind. The end-punctuation, or lack of it, gives the poem, despite its lack of rhythm or rhyme, a kind of momentum that itself suggests the hard approach of winter. The poem itself provides few end-stops; the enjambment capturing the quiet anxiety over how winter approaches with cunning directness, there is no stopping it.