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20 pages 40 minutes read

William Carlos Williams

Spring and All

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Literary Devices

Form

To mimic nature’s own halting and gorgeously inelegant move into spring, the poem’s own form is halting and gorgeously inelegant. The poem’s seven stanzas have varying line numbers, from two to six. There is no evident design to which stanzas have what number of lines, a formal equivalent of the ebb and flow of the energy distribution typical of early spring. The poem is loosely shaped around two couplets, although neither couplet provides anything like a pivotal message nor refrain to justify the arrangement. That haphazard form is underscored by the poem’s lack of traditional rhythm or rhyme patterns.

Williams’s free form—the shifting lines, the varying line length, the undisciplined stanzaic breaks—all express the wonder of the poet’s discovery of the quiet animation-in-process in the wintery world of his commute. To convey that sense of discovery in traditional patterns of fixed rhythm and anticipated rhymes, the traditional blocked stanzas of preset lines would create about that discovery a kind of martial militancy that loses the halting, gradual movement of the speaker into the reassurance that spring will arrive. The form is organic, matching the content. Lines waver. Sentences fragment. Lines meander. Lines stumble. Like spring, the poem maintains a fluid form. Against the subject matter, the lingering chill of winter, the energy of the free form urges a countermovement that formally captures the anarchy of the spring about to be released.

Meter

To set a poem about the gradual return of the spring to the percussive patterns of conventional meter would be to misrepresent how spring returns. Despite the month’s name, spring hardly marches in. The steady and reliable beat of meter would give the return of spring an unnatural sense of ease and predictability, like a marching band in a delivery room.

Rather, the poem records that fragile moment when a person is still not entirely sure spring will return, winter seeming too oppressive, too absolute, too persistent. Rather than regular beat, however, Williams creates an experience that rewards recitation by capturing the almost reluctant return to animation typical of late winter. Williams uses three devices to create an irregular meter that captures the ebb and flow of spring’s approach: the casual (but anything but random) placement of commas within and between lines; the use of the dash in idiosyncratic ways that echo the lines of Emily Dickinson (whose poetry was just beginning to find its audience) and that provide opportunities for a fuller, broader pause than commas; and supremely (from Whitman), the careful blend of long vowels (particularly i’s and e’s) with sibilant s’s, which invites a dramatic recitation that lingers over such luscious combinations, which mimics the natural world’s own hesitant movement into spring.

Voice

The voice in “Spring and All” is at once intensely private and yet impersonal—appropriate to a poet who found inspiration in painting and who marveled at how, in the visual medium, the artist was at once immediate and absent.

The detailing of the fields awaiting spring’s return is observational and scientific. The voice of the speaker is manifested in the clarity of the detailing, the specifications of textures and colors, and the attention to angles, lines, and shapes:

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines (Lines 9-13).

The speaker is a camera, recording with documentarian objectivity the field and its vegetation struggling toward animation.

But that impersonal voice is intensely personal as well. The poem is like flipping through the photos on someone’s phone. Yes, the images present themselves objectively, but the photographer is insinuated in each shot, in the details, at once there and not there. Nothing in the poem is personal. Nothing actually says in the text that this is the rural road leading up to Passaic General, or that the voice is Dr. Bill Williams on his way to work, and/or that this accidental collision of shapes, lines, and colors during his commute is something that struck his open and roving eye. But every detail reveals that. The voice then speaks to the reader in a dynamic way, at once the voiceover of a documentary on the Discovery channel and at the same moment the quiet whisper of the speaker as he experiences one of those rare moments when the world reveals itself.

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