Spring Storm

William Carlos Williams’s “Spring Storm” uses vivid imagery and simple language to describe the natural turning of seasons. Like many of Williams’s poems, “Spring Storm” explores the concept of “no ideas but in things,” and uses specific images to delve deeper into important themes, such as the Revivification of Spring, Cycles of Life, and The Bleakness of Winter. A true Modernist, Williams focuses on describing everyday images to explore universal truths. In “Spring Storm,” specifically, Williams illustrates an occurrence that is already familiar to most people, a spring storm, to comment upon the cycles of life and inevitability of change.

Although the poem seems to be focused solely on concrete images, Williams stresses from the beginning the duality of intent in “Spring Storm.” Despite the poem’s direct use of concrete language, it opens with a line that immediately references an invisible abstraction: “The sky has given over / its bitterness” (Lines 1-2). Because the sky does not literally give “bitterness,” the meaning of the word is abstract and requires reader interpretation; tears and rain drops are often likened and share an underlying symbolic meaning associated with sadness. “Bitterness” that comes from the sky could refer to water from a storm, as if the sky is crying out its own “bitterness” in the form of ever-falling rain: “Out of the dark change / all day long / rain falls and falls / as if it would never end” (Lines 3-6).