“Spring and All” (1923) by William Carlos Williams is our poem of the week. Like everyone else in mid-March, I am desperately searching for signs of spring in the countryside. Williams is also searching a bleak winter landscape for signs of new life.
The short poem can be read here. It’s most famous line is probably the first,
By the road to the contagious hospital
By profession, Williams was a medical doctor, a pediatrician, spending his entire career at a hospital in his native northern New Jersey. He was the son of one William George Williams, who grew up in the Dominican Republic. His mother was from Puerto Rico. He grew up in. a Spanish-speaking household.
Technically, Spring and All is the name of the entire book in which the poem appears under the Roman numeral “I.” Poem No. 22 (XXII) is the more famous “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which reads, in it’s entirely,
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.
“The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of poetry’s most famous tiny poems, along with Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913),
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
In Williams “Spring and All,” the author searches for, but does not quite see, the signs of spring he knows are there. The poem closes,
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
