Spring and All

To mimic nature’s own halting and gorgeously inelegant move into spring, the poem’s own form is halting and gorgeously inelegant. The poem’s seven stanzas have varying line numbers, from two to six. There is no evident design to which stanzas have what number of lines, a formal equivalent of the ebb and flow of the energy distribution typical of early spring. The poem is loosely shaped around two couplets, although neither couplet provides anything like a pivotal message nor refrain to justify the arrangement. That haphazard form is underscored by the poem’s lack of traditional rhythm or rhyme patterns.

Williams’s free form—the shifting lines, the varying line length, the undisciplined stanzaic breaks—all express the wonder of the poet’s discovery of the quiet animation-in-process in the wintery world of his commute. To convey that sense of discovery in traditional patterns of fixed rhythm and anticipated rhymes, the traditional blocked stanzas of preset lines would create about that discovery a kind of martial militancy that loses the halting, gradual movement of the speaker into the reassurance that spring will arrive. The form is organic, matching the content.