Spring and All

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Hospital

From a strictly biographical standpoint, the “contagious hospital” (Line 1) that provides the backdrop for the poet’s late winter epiphany is presumably Passaic General Hospital, where Dr. Bill Williams was on staff. In recounting a moment on his own commute to work on an otherwise ordinary morning symbolically suggests Williams’s faith in those moments when the world we so easily take for granted can suddenly, unexpectedly shimmer into meaning. After all, the speaker is actually a pediatrician and the hospital is actually his workplace. Imagine, the poem reminds us, how the world can so suddenly reveal itself.

More generally, however, the hospital as backdrop gives the poem symbolically its urgent sense of hope, specifically the promise of recovery. A hospital, after all, is not a morgue, nor is it a cemetery. Those patients in the hospital are recovering, their every moment a promise snatched from the reality of death. For now, the hospital gifts the poem with its optimism. Nature is on the mend. Winter is a condition that will pass. As a doctor, Williams undoubtedly walked the corridors of Passaic General seeing not dying but recovering patients, every room, every bed, speaking to the promise of returning vitality and the recovery of health. Imagine, the poem posits, a doctor in March. That doctor sees March but feels May.

The “Cold, Familiar Wind”

The “cold, familiar” (Line 19) wind that blows steadily from the northeast (a chilling blast from arctic Canada) symbolizes the too-easy surrender to the powerful death-grip of winter. The wind symbolizes the apparent formidable power of winter. The steady wind cutting through the bare trees and rippling the standing puddles of melting snow is a reminder of winter’s strength. The wind moans steadily throughout the poem. It never abates. That steadiness suggests the lingering pull of winter. The world is days, perhaps weeks away from that wind abating.

It takes a poet to feel beyond the chill and to feel there in the blasted wasteland the frailest suggestions of spring’s return. For most people, the cold wind of late March mandates pulling coats tighter, shielding the face from its forbidding onrush, and thus necessarily dropping their eyes away from observing that the muddy world of late winter is in fact stirring to life in that “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff” (Lines 9-11). The enveloping wind insists on the cold reality of continuing winter, demands the person lives locked only in the now, unavailable to the generous promise of tomorrow; the landscape, edging to rebirth, whispers the radical energy of transition. The winter wasteland speaks to the poet: Be patient, nothing is lost.

The Wildcarrot Leaf

So much depends on the “stiff curl” (Line 21) of the “wildcarrot” leaf (Line 21). The wild carrot leaf the speaker anticipates will dazzle the muddy fields symbolizes hope. That future tense is everything. The speaker today takes encouragement from the tufts of spring-tinged grass defiantly reclaiming its green. But that modest re-animation for the speaker promises that tomorrow there will be bigger things, “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf” (Line 21). The wild carrot then is a moment of audacious hope that transcends the wintery limits of the world around the poet.

The wild carrot, or Queen Anne’s lace (the subject of other Williams’s poems), is a hardy plant that blooms early in the spring. Thus the plant with its scruffy white flower is a kind of bold counterinsurgency, a guerilla movement undermining the death-grip of winter’s authority by daring to spike the dead world of winter-too-long with color and life. To accentuate the anti-authoritarian nature of the manic wild carrot, the speaker boldly recreates the name of the plant itself into a grammatically-wrong single word, “wildcarrot”—a gesture that not only signals his own rebellion against authority but creates an unexpectedly rushed moment in any recitation that suggests in turn the poet’s own anticipation of the return of spring’s wildflowers.