We celebrated the First of Spring ‘down here’ (as opposed to autumn ‘up there’ 😉 ) on 1 September and have enjoyed some beautiful spring days since — but still with some icy winds, sub-zero mornings, and only some plants putting on their spring green and blossom.

Spring blossom; valiant on a vacant (demolition) lot

A state of affairs that always brings to mind the William Carlos Williams’ poem Spring and All. The discussion below is to give you a ‘feel’ for the poem and why I love it, but I also urge you to read it in its full glory, which you can do at AllPoetry.com:

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

Original 1923 edition

There’s so much about Spring and All to love, starting with the opening lines: “By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled cloud.” As with Issa’s haiku, spring rain, where a rat laps the Sumida river, the poem instantly conveys a juxtaposition of the ‘sacred’, e.g. the freshness and renewal of spring and/or spring rain, with the ‘profane’: that is, a hospital for the ‘contagious’, or a rat, which is ‘vermin’ (and famed for carrying contagion. 🙂 )

Williams’ spring, though, is closer to TS Eliot’s April (in The Wasteland), that is the “cruelest month, breeding violets out of the dead land.” In Spring and All a “sluggish dazed spring approaches”, but it is not fully here yet, with “All about them the cold, familiar wind—“

Kindle edition

A depiction I recognize every time I step outside into our very recent spring, which reinforces the veracity of the poetic observation in this poem — and causes me to celebrate the way in which veracity and keen observation lie at the heart of poetry’s “m.o.”

I believe that’s why poems and lines of poems so frequently stay with us, expressing and capturing our experiences of and in the world. In this case, I greatly admire the way Spring and All captures the way spring—and the excitement of spring—begins with “It quickens”, then concludes the poem with an ending that is, in fact, a beginning. One that is impossible to shake when observing spring taking hold:

Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

from Spring and All, (c) William Carlos Williams

Magnolia stellata — an early starter