Spring and All

Coolly clinical and yet thematically tender, William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” is a distinctly modern celebration of the return of spring, a poem that is at once subdued yet giddy, stark yet lyrical.

First published in 1923 in a collection of the same name, “Spring and All” became one of Williams’s most recognized and anthologized poems. Williams was known as much for his Eastern-influenced minimalist style that rejected both anticipated rhymes and predictable rhythms as for his careful observational eye that elevated into the poetic the most extraordinarily ordinary landscapes of his Rutherford, New Jersey home. Here he recreates a moment in his daily commute to the hospital where he worked as a pediatrician for nearly 40 years. It is early spring. From Williams’s perspective, nature struggles to shrug off the oppressive weight of winter. The movement into spring is as sluggish as it is heroic, as incremental as it is determined. Reflecting Williams’s fascination with the grasping imagination of the painterly eye as well as his dedication to the maverick formal experiments of post-World War I Modernism, the poem reflects how nature almost grudgingly stirs back to life in those first few fragile days that mark the beginnings of spring.

Poet Biography

William Carlos Williams was born 17 September 1883 in the city of Rutherford in northeast New Jersey. Early on a voracious reader who fell under the spell of the sonic dramas in the free verse experiments of fellow New Jerseyite Walt Whitman (who died when Williams was nine and was buried less than an hour away in Camden), Williams was as well drawn to painting, fascinated by how artists recreated the lines, shadows, shapes, and colors of the world all around. Influenced by his parents to be practical, Williams committed his education to the sciences, initially pursuing dentistry before completing a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia. He completed his studies in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

At Penn, Williams met Ezra Pound. Pound was also a struggling poet and student of languages, and he was just beginning to appreciate the opportunities to reinvent literature offered by Modernism, which was then sweeping Europe. Even as Williams returned to Rutherford from his stint in Europe and began what would be a near 40-year career as a physician specializing in pediatric care, he began in his off hours to experiment with poetry. His verse was informed as much by the revolutionary manifestoes of Modernism that called for avant-garde expression and celebrated the radical power of perception as by his fascination with the complex rhythms he heard in Whitman, whose daring innovations in crafting poetic lines that read more like lines of music were just beginning to be appreciated.

Never abandoning his grounding in medicine (later Williams estimated that in his 40 years he delivered upwards of 2,000 babies), Williams pursued his poetry quietly. Most of his patients never knew he published poetry. He would jot down poetic lines on prescription pads during rounds or on napkins in the hospital cafeteria. For more than 20 years, Williams published his idiosyncratic verses in small circulation literary journals or in limited publication chapbooks. He developed a small but appreciative readership who responded to his celebration of American subjects in fragmented lines that reflected the language patterns and subtle music of conversational US English. His poetry, influenced by Imagism, a movement championed by Pound himself, rejected the trendy notion that poetry tangle with complex philosophical questions. Williams never bought into the critical praise that, just one year before the publication of Spring and All, greeted T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Rather, poetry should embrace the world about the poet and share that enthusiasm in poems of inviting simplicity that used subtle aural effects to make for compelling recitation.

Although Williams enjoyed a long career as a poet, his work would not find a wide audience until the Beat movement in the 1950s with its celebration of the music of open verse and its embrace of the spiritual simplicity that informed by Eastern rather than Western thought. Even as Williams’s own health began to fail—he never fully recovered from a massive coronary in 1948—that generation found profound influence in Williams’s unaffected exuberance over the delights of the world and his meticulous crafting of each line into syllable-crisp concision. His work was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize just months before his death, 4 March 1963.

Poem Text

By the road to the contagious hospital 

under the surge of the blue  

mottled clouds driven from the   

northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the   

waste of broad, muddy fields  

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen 

patches of standing water 

the scattering of tall trees 

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy 

stuff of bushes and small trees 

with dead, brown leaves under them 

leafless vines—  

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish 

dazed spring approaches— 

They enter the new world naked, 

cold, uncertain of all 

save that they enter. All about them 

the cold, familiar wind— 

Now the grass, tomorrow 

the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf 

One by one objects are defined— 

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf 

But now the stark dignity of 

entrance—Still, the profound change 

has come upon them: rooted, they 

grip down and begin to awaken.

Williams, William Carlos. “Spring and All.” 1923. Poets.org.

Summary

The speaker, presumably Williams, drives to the “contagious hospital” (Line 1). Nature is only reluctantly beginning to move from the season of forbidding cold and bleak landscapes to the season of the tonic rush of colorful flowers, lush grass, and pastel blossoms.

For now, that spring is only a premise. Beneath “blue / mottled clouds (Lines 2-3), the speaker drives past “muddy fields / brown with dried weeds” (Lines 5-6). A steady wind blows from the northeast, that is, from the bitter north Atlantic, a suggestion of frigid air. The speaker drives through forlorn puddles of melted slush. He notes bushes and small trees, still weeks away from blooming, now “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff” (Lines 9-11). For now, the world seems “lifeless, “sluggish” (Line 14). But the world is lifeless in “appearance” (Line 14) only. Nature—spring, rather—is dormant.

The speaker is presently content with the returning green of the grass to evidence the approaching spring. Tomorrow, perhaps, the “stiff curl” of “wildcarrot” (Line 21) will appear. Then one by one the blossoms, the flowers, the buds of the season will each appear. The speaker sees that this gradual return to life will signal at last that spring is ready to begin, what the speaker terms “the stark dignity” (Line 25) of the season’s arrival. Still, the speaker feels the change that he knows is coming, that the plants, the trees, the grass so brownish, so brittle, so lifeless, are all preparing to make the urgent change to spring, to “begin to awaken” (Line 27).