{"id":43311,"date":"2025-09-15T06:30:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T18:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=43311"},"modified":"2025-09-14T20:33:02","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T08:33:02","slug":"about-spring-and-all-william-carlos-williams-1883-1963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2025\/09\/15\/about-spring-and-all-william-carlos-williams-1883-1963\/","title":{"rendered":"About “Spring and All” — William Carlos Williams, 1883 – 1963"},"content":{"rendered":"

We celebrated the First of Spring ‘down here’ (as opposed to autumn ‘up there’ \ud83d\ude09 ) on 1 September and have enjoyed some beautiful spring days since — but still with some icy winds, sub-zero mornings, and only some<\/em> plants putting on their spring green and blossom.<\/p>\n

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Spring blossom; valiant on a vacant (demolition) lot<\/p><\/div>\n

A state of affairs that always brings to mind the William Carlos Williams’ poem Spring and All<\/em><\/strong>. 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<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Spring and All<\/em> by William Carlos Williams<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Original 1923 edition<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s so much about Spring and All<\/em> to love, starting with the opening lines: “By the road to the contagious hospital <\/span><\/em>under the surge of the blue <\/span>mottled cloud<\/span>.”<\/em> As with Issa’s haiku, spring rain<\/em><\/a>, 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. \ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n

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

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Kindle edition<\/p><\/div>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/em> captures the way spring—and the excitement of spring—begins with “It quickens”<\/em>, then concludes the poem with an ending that is, in fact, a beginning. One that is impossible to shake when observing spring taking hold:<\/p>\n

Still, the profound change<\/span><\/em>
\nhas come upon them: rooted, they<\/span><\/em>
\ngrip down and begin to awaken<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

from Spring and All<\/em>, (c) William Carlos Williams<\/p>\n

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Magnolia stellata — an early starter<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We celebrated the First of Spring ‘down here’ (as opposed to autumn ‘up there’ \ud83d\ude09 ) 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. A state of affairs that always brings to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43311"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43327,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43311\/revisions\/43327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}