Approach of Winter

If this were a traditional, convention poem with a poet insisting on freighting stuff with meaning, the half-stripped trees would represent nature’s resistance to death, the violence of the change of seasons, and the cycle of seasonal movement. But this is not a traditional, conventional poem and the half stripped trees (no hyphen) are visual not thematic. The poem captures in radical and individually phrased words exactly what is seen (a deliberately passive voice construction as no poet can be implicated), a self-consciously direct fronting of a moment, a mood stripped of emotional intrusion. Nothing, Williams argues, but the thing itself.

Williams could have lined the poem’s bare garden with any familiar decorative flowers; junipers, lilies, marigolds, lavender, and zinnias are all common and very familiar ornamental flowers that can be used to edge gardens in Williams’s native Northeast. The poem uses salvias and carmine instead, which are not just ornamental flowers for Williams (although they are that) but exotic words, words that interrupt a poem that is otherwise sustained by a roughly middle-school vocabulary level. The choice to use such exotic words reflects a deliberate assault on the poem itself.