“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.“
—William Carlos Williams
Spring and fall are the transitional seasons. In the fall, we’re coming out of summer and preparing for winter. Temperatures drop, the ground hardens, things hibernate or die altogether as we prepare for a season of darkness, gathering closer together. In the spring, we lean into the light as the air warms and expands and the cycle of life begins again. Spring and fall are the penultimate seasons — they put life into sharper clarity as they herald what is to come. We are a little bit more alive in the spring and fall, attuned to what lies ahead.
I have vivid memories associated with spring. Growing up in the Midwest, I always thought of warmer temperatures when the clocks changed, regardless of what Punxsutawney Phil did the month before. I have pungent memories of warm egg salad sandwiches in the spring, like Proust’s memories of madeleines.
And I’ve always thought of “Spring And All” at the vernal equinox. In this short but epic poem, which William Carlos Williams published in 1923, we’re rooted in decay and then transported into the sacrament of renewal and rebirth. Once read, it’s never forgotten. It’s magical.
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and eventually became Chief of Pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. When he wasn’t doctoring, he was writing — short stories, essays, criticism, plays, but mostly poetry, his wheelhouse. He was friends with Ezra Pound, the literary world‘s Zelig in the early 20th century, and Hilda Doolittle, who pioneered the Imagist movement in poetry, writing as H.D. Williams was an early and energetic champion of Allen Ginsberg, writing the introduction to “Howl.” He won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. Williams didn’t just dabble in poetry; he was bonafide.
Early on, Williams was part of a small group of poets who considered themselves “imagists,” including Pound and H.D. Imagism revered precision of imagery and economy of language — think of Hemingway’s prose as a good example. Soon, though, Williams developed his own unique style, one with a deep appreciation of place, common life and vibrant, physical reality. “No ideas but in things,” he wrote in “A Sort of Song.” Williams had no time for abstraction. He was rooted in the everyday.
That sense of location and physicality is reduced to its essence in one of Williams’s finest poems — I think one of the finest in the English language — “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens
Williams was writing about radical presence, what we mean today when we talk about mindfulness. He takes us somewhere, quietly demanding that we be present. Our understanding of the poem depends exactly on how clearly we experience the tableau Williams describes. “So much depends upon a red wheel barrow,” he declares, daring us to look away. The only way to enter the poem is turn off the analytical, abstract mind and simply be present in the moment. “Be here now,” said Ram Dass. He could’ve been talking about this poem.
That same sense of radical presence is at the heart of “Spring and All,” which seems to describe Williams walking to work “by the road to the contagious hospital.”
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 fallenpatches of standing water
the scattering of tall treesAll 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 leafBut now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
Immediately we’re plunged into a world of hyper realism: wind-driven clouds, fields of mud and puddles, a few forlorn trees, all of it dormant and dull. The language accelerates. We see some color and motion, the “twiggy stuff of bushes,” “forked and upstanding.” It’s a struggle, though. The transition from winter to spring is hard, almost “lifeless in appearance.” Even when life does “enter the world naked” it’s still “cold, uncertain.”
This is the miracle of spring — after months of darkness and struggle, we’re presented with transformation and hope, “the stark dignity of entrance” and the “profound change” of new life. The radical presence Williams describes with his “glazed wheelbarrow” asserts itself here with grass, wildcarrots and leaves, a “quickening” of life. What was once formless and barren now becomes strong and rooted; such is the very definition of hope.
Hope, of course, is the very definition of America. Our country was built on hope — hope of a freer life, a more prosperous life, a life liberated by opportunity and enterprise. And Williams, like Whitman, is one of our most American poets. It was his love — maybe his obsession — with America that led him to write “In the American Grain,” a collection of essays beginning with Columbus’s discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.
Marc Hofstadter of UC Santa Cruz said of Williams: "Thinking of himself as a local poet who possessed neither the high culture nor the old-world manners of (T.S.) Eliot or Pound, he sought to express his democracy through his way of speaking. . . . His point was to speak on an equal level with the reader, and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his point of view."
So it’s this great American poet, William Carlos Williams, who wrote a timeless poem about regeneration and hope in the midst of death and decay. And he wrote it in the here and now, in the language of America — unadorned by sentiment or artifice, direct and energetic, suited to purpose.
Every spring I think of “Spring and All” — and rooted, I begin to awaken. Such is the gift of poetry, hope and America.
Super well done piece on one of the greatest poets ever.