Spring and All

The poem takes place on one of those late winter mornings when the world, overtired of cold, gray days, seems ready for spring. Nature, however, is not quite ready. Winter lingers. It is another day of work. Williams is presumably driving to work at Passaic General Hospital, now St. Mary’s, where he served as Chief of Pediatrics for more than 40 years. The somber tone is set by the adjective “contagious” (Line 1), which emphasizes the hospital not as a place for healing and recovery but rather for sickness and the spread of sickness. The world, dragging through the last hard weeks of winter, feels ill. Something about winter feels like an affliction, a kind of fever, an enclosing frozen world barren of life, settled into the certainty of its dreary routine.

Spring ultimately begins as a faint stirring. There are no buds, no blossoms, no leaves. The speaker notes “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff” (Lines 9-11), nothing that could be mistaken for spring flowering. At best, spring “approaches” (Line 15) and is “sluggish” (Line 14), as if emerging from a heavy hibernation, as if confused over exactly what the responsibilities of returning to life involve.

It is at Line 16 that the poem changes. The fourth stanza shifts the focus from “it”—this wasteland landscape—to these soon-to-be budding plants, a “they.” Nature is no longer the hard, impersonal “it.” The speaker shifts tone to think of nature as they, countless plants waiting to defy winter and explode into spring. The tone becomes quietly optimistic. The forbidding claustrophobic cloak of winter begins to lift. Nature is a “they,” a cooperative community of soon-to-be buds and leaves and grass and blossoms, a community determined to live, or at least begin to stir to life: “They enter the new world naked / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter” (Lines 16-18). The speaker stresses how vulnerable and weak these new sprouts are in their first hours and how the lingering winter still poses a very real threat but takes heart that they are here.

In short, nature seems uninterested in the recovery into spring, interred in the lingering chill of winter. Williams, however, was a doctor who refused to concede to the curve of mortality as something to accept. Indeed, like the bedridden patients in the nearby hospital, winter by definition promises spring, promises nature’s reassuring return to health and vigor. But like any hospital stay, that return to vigor can be realized only incrementally. The restorative nature of spring hinges on that movement in Stanza 5 from the impersonal pronoun “It” to the pronoun “They.” “They” is more personal, broader, more animated. The effortless, subtle movement to “They” suggests how spring spreads its energy subtly, slowly, until by May nature itself will become that familiar wide and splendid energy field we call spring.

The promise of the poem rests on a single word: “tomorrow” (Line 20). Today, nature at best stirs to reluctant life the grass as it tinges into green. But tomorrow? Just wait. Then the speaker understands, one by one, one moment at a time, one bud at a time, that spring will return, clarifying itself in the emerging outlines of leaves. Spring for now is pure potential. For now, the speaker embraces the role of a kind of secular John the Baptist announcing to an apparently dead winter world that winter will never be the last word, that spring, its presence perhaps puny and thin for now, is inevitable. Spring is here because it is coming. Like a newborn struggling just to clear the birth canal, just to find its way to animation, spring even as it struggles affirms life, celebrates continuity, and offers hope. For now, the speaker urges, feel the energy beneath, there in the ground as spring begins to take root. That “profound change” (Line 23) is coming. As any pediatrician would, Williams reminds us of the rich beauty of this messy, imperfect, and agonizingly slow-motion birth.

The poem closes then not with the arrival of spring but rather with the anticipation of the arrival of spring, an act of hope defined against and amid a natural world that seems loathe to leave the dead world of winter. The speaker, however, will not easily surrender the world to winter. Like the patients in the nearby “contagious hospital” (Line 1), nature is not dying but is sick, winter like some temporary condition. Nature, as the poem affirms in the closing line, is not doomed. It affirms recovery, assumes resurrection, and embraces anticipation.