Aaron Antrim

Reader Response Essay

Portfolio Draft

17 May 2005

 

 

On “Spring and All”: Two Sides to the Story

 

The first line of “Spring and All” offers a contradiction that continues to puzzle the reader up to the conclusion, the “contagious hospital ( l . 1).”  This “contagious hospital” is the first in a series of contradictions and incongruities, some semantic and others thematic, which the reader is challenged to solve in order to arrive at an understanding of the poem’s meaning.

At the first line, a puzzled reader may find him or herself asking questions:   Isn’t contagion and cleanliness scrupulously contolled in hospitals, and don’t patients go there, not expecting to contract new diseases, but to be cured of their old ones — and wasn’t this true even in 1923, when Williams wrote “Spring and All”?

Next, a reader might also ask his or herself: In what way is the hospital contagious?  What does Williams intend with this choice of words?  It is in the contrast between the “contagious hospital” and Williams’ later description of the natural landscape as a healthy but brutal setting where we will find answers to these questions.  Disease and death exist in the hospital because they are labeled as such.  Unlabeled, they do not exist in the same way in nature — not as individual tragedies but necessary transformations in nature’s cycle.  Life emerges out of death, the two comprising a continuous cycle, where cases of disease and death are seen more for the larger patterns they comprise together than the individual parts they play.  

The reader will find that the remainder of the first stanza resists being deciphered into a single meaning.  Individual parts of phrases appear to describe something different than they describe as a whole:

Under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind ( l . 2-4)

 

At first, the “surge of blue” seems to suggest intense spring skies, but this pleasing image is soon over-ridden when the description continues in line 3.  It turns out the clouds in the sky are “mottled” with blue — that is, clear patches show as blue foreground on a more substantial cloudy backdrop.  The reader senses vibrant spring colors are beginning to show themselves but have not yet fully emerged.

The scene reads as if two separate images have been combined — first, “the surge of the blue, ( l . 2)” evoking thoughts of sudden change and unassailable tides with “surge” and suggesting vibrancy and brightness with “blue,” and second, “mottled clouds driven from the northeast — ( l . 3)”, a dreary image — cloudy skies, of course, being so, and the adjective “mottled” also falling into the same vein, suggesting the appearance of spoiled food or detritus rotting in a fallow field.

“The surge of blue” is an image of spring and “mottled clouds” is an image of winter.  What we get from the way these two images are combined into one description is that the poem is set in the transition between winter and spring.  It is this in-between-ness, as well as the dull shapelessness of the winter, which lies behind the seeming incoherence of the first three stanzas of “Spring and All.”

 The contradictions continue with “dried weeds, standing and fallen , ( l . 6)” and the less obvious, albeit still juxtapositional

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—” ( l . 11-14)

 

On one hand the dormant vegetation is “upstanding,” still holding itself up — and this adjective reads almost as a present progressive verb, implying the vegetation is imbued with some sort of force, but on the other hand the vegetation appears dead because of the color and shape of its foliage.  This is an example where a semantic contradiction clues us into tensions in the theme of the poem.  It is clear “Spring and All” is not a Wordsworthian verse about dancing with daffodils.  There is some other, less clichéd view of spring expressed in Williams’ poem.  Without denying the hopeful face of spring, “Spring and All” also reminds us of a dark side of spring.  It is not incidental, for example, that the suicide rate increases as winter turns into spring (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/820241.stm).

In the springtime half of the poem, readers will notice a new and different character in the descriptive words.  Many suggest the presence of consciousness: vegetation sprouting fourth is at first “uncertain, ( l . 17)” but as the narrative carries on “objects are defined, ( l . 22)” resulting in “clarity ( l . 23).”  “Entrance ( l . 25)” not only has a “stark dignity ( l . 24)” but also results in a “profound change ( l . 25).”

The use of the word “profound” is particularly notable here because it is usually pertains to metaphysical and intellectual subjects rather than physical nature, indicating intellectual or spiritual depth.  It is as if Williams is describing a landscape coming into Being (with a capital B).

The growth Williams is describing may be happening literally on a vegetational level, but, due to the personified landscape, the reader must also feel it is happening on an intellectual level.  Williams’ poetic style was not one of gauzy romantic hues but sharp angular descriptions.  This stemmed from his work as a physician, which would have required that he subscribe to a systematized and precise way of thinking.  He once said his poems were written under “arc lamps,” in essence saying that in finished form they were as hard and immalleable as steel.  This would explain why entrance into Being is not described in “Spring and All” as a burst into feeling or experience, but a process where “one by one objects are defined ( l. 22).”

Continuing to employ our understanding of Williams’ figurative landscape in the last lines, “the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken, ( l . 25-27)” we interpret that not only have fields lain dormant for the winter (“brown with dried weeds [ l . 6]”), but also that some consciousness (of the plants, of the Earth, of ourselves, or of something else) has slept over winter and is now beginning to wake up.

Since William Carlos Williams wrote, in his semi-autobiographical work Patterson that there are “no ideas but in things,” it seems logical to ask what idea he was trying to express using the things of the “Spring and All” landscape.  With the poem so focused on portraying plants as sentient beings like ourselves, we are then prompted to ask, “Is this poem about human beings?” and invert the scenario where plants are personified with human attributes into a scenario where we look at humans metaphorically as the plants in the poem.  It is through this lens that the poem comes into focus.

Furthering our interpretation of Williams’ consciousness-imbuing descriptions of the plants, we find that “they,” who “enter the new world naked” ( l . 14) must be newborn babies.  This interpretation rests on the many suggestions of consciousness in the last three stanzas, the fact that Williams was a physician, and the presence of the “contagious hospital.”  With the theme of birth included in our interpretation, the mention of the hospital no longer seems as incongruous in the poem as it did when we first encountered it. It appears that Williams found language to describe the entrance of new human life into the world by looking away from the hospital and to the natural world, calling attention to the frighteningly delicate condition in which life comes into being (a condition which the hospital is intended to counteract, controlling the birth process to make it safer).

For the reader, meaning must be drawn out of the way the difference between the themes suggested by the poem, seemingly at odds with each other, are resolved.  These two themes each draw from one of the opposite polarities of spring.  On one hand springtime inspires optimism. On the other hand its harsh, bare landscape of abrupt change can be uncomfortable for some, hence the increase in the suicide rate.  In the end, however, the thematic balance tilts toward the side of hope, as suggested by the secure permanence intoned by the word “ rooted” and phrase “grip down,” and the optimism inherent in the last word, “awaken.”  Metaphorically, the natural progression of spring will clear away the dead leftovers and mud of winter as they are replaced with spring’s fresh crop of new life.