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William Carlos WilliamsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
By William Carlos Williams
Approach of Winter
William Carlos Williams
Between Walls
William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
William Carlos Williams
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams
Paterson
William Carlos Williams
Spring Storm
William Carlos Williams
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
The Young Housewife
William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say
William Carlos Williams
To Elsie
William Carlos Williams
To Waken An Old Lady
William Carlos Williams