Approach of Winter

The changing of the seasons is a dramatic, even epical phenomenon realized nevertheless through a quiet process of remarkably undramatic moments. William Carlos Williams’s “Approach of Winter” (1921) captures such a dramatically undramatic moment. Appropriately, the poem itself seems a trifling sort of almost-poem, a spare 11 lines, no line more than five words. Visually, the poem is a handful of printed words set against the intimidating stark white of an otherwise blank page. And those words do not even find their way to the reassurance of a complete sentence.

The poem is a gathering of observations, a juxtaposition of images--the bare trees, the brittle leaves, a bare flower garden edged with decorative plants of vivid colors--those fragments, snatched from an otherwise neutral landscape, have left the poet feeling autumn edging into winter. By focusing on the dead, brittle leaves that seem unwilling to let go of the branches, the poem suggests that anxious, fragile moment when a vibrant fall quietly surrenders to the dead-grip of winter. As such, “Approach of Winter” represents a short-lived but highly provocative genre of early 20th-century poetry termed by its own practitioners as Imagism, poetry that freed the poet to create a

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