Approach of Winter

“Approach of Winter” deliberately refuses to engage its historic moment. After all, Williams first drafted the poem in the closing years of World War I, to that historic moment an international conflict so brutal in its carnage, so complete in its destruction that a generation hoped it would be the War to End all Wars. For the self-described Lost Generation, then a gathering of writers, artists, and musicians largely in Paris, catastrophe on that scale, as meaningless as it was apocalyptic, should command the work of its artists. What did such a war mean? What are we to do now in the ruins?

Williams, who lived for a time in Europe, disdained imposing on poetry weighty and intellectual social critique, the responsibility to take as its subject nothing less than the moral and spiritual aridity of Western civilization itself, which would shape T. S. Eliot’s ambitious Waste Land, published with the editorial supervision of Williams’s own mentor Ezra Pound, just months after “Approach of Winter” to wide critical plaudits. By comparison, “Approach of Winter” embraces a far more modest kind of poetry but one that in its implications is both significant and culturally therapeutic. The poem reflects a much quieter, much less grand historical context: the poet’s own biography. The understated grandness of Williams’s poem is informed by his background in the sciences rather than the arts and his profession as a doctor with a specialty in pediatrics.

First, the poem reflects the cool, clean eye typical of the scientist. The recording of the images is done with a clinical objectivity, a close attention to detail. It reflects Williams’s training in the sciences. Unlike other Modernist poets of his generation, university-trained in the arts or in languages or in literature, Williams understood the responsibility of the open and careful eye, the value of cool observation and the gathering of accurate data. Thus, the poem reflects few baggy adjectives that might lend themselves to flabby interpretation. The sole attempt to impose a reading on the objective presentation is the adverb “bitterly” (Line 7) to capture the sense of the autumn’s resistance to yielding to winter. Other than that, the poem deals in colors and position and remains true to the surfaces of things. It is less a poem than a data point.

Yet that fidelity to observation is infused with the wonder of a child. The poem, for example, celebrates a tree. A pediatrician, Williams immersed himself in the world of children, listened to their questions, felt their joy, watched them learn about the world every day, really every moment. Yes, the poem is rendered in clean lines and in the careful, accurate precision of a scientist, but the language, so direct and so simple, echoes the tonic wonder of a child exploring a world, despite the chill, despite the forbidding sense, that still enchants, still amazes, still enthralls. After all, an adult would most likely pass half-stripped trees and dead garden plots without noticing the miracle there right under their eyes. In Sour Grapes, the collection in which “Approach to Winter” first appeared, Williams offered other snapshot moments: a snow drift after a nor’easter, a locomotive engine at the station, a fire truck roaring down the street, a daisy in a field, a flock of blackbirds in the rain, the noxious weed known as Queen-Anne’s-lace, and a dormant tulip bed in early May. They are poems that reflect the animated perceptions of a child still too young to be complacent, still too full of wonder to surrender to indifference. The cool eye of a scientist, the open heart of a pediatrician, Williams’s own historic context defines the cool delight and lonely magic of “Approach to Winter.”