Poem for the Times: 'Spring and All (By the road to the contagious hospital)'

James Burkinshaw recommends William Carlos Williams' poem, 'Spring and All (By the road to the contagious hospital)'.


American poet William Carlos Williams was a medical practitioner, with a scientist's attention to detail and a profound sense of human fragility. In this great Modernist poem, he gradually shifts the reader's perspective, so that we begin by staring up into the vast, oppressive sky, then start noticing the trees and bushes with their "dead, brown leaves" around us, before finally directing our gaze downwards into the soil, where new life "quickens", ready to "awaken". Throughout, we are conscious of the looming presence of the "contagious hospital" presented starkly in the opening line. 

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast - a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

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

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -

Now the grass, tomorrow
The stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined -
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance - Still the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken