Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 101

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

The “road” already establishes the theme of transit and arrival; and the
structure of the first sentence fragment, proceeding through modifiers to the
spondaically weighted subject, begins the pattern of emergence. Ironically,
what there emerges as a living force is the adverse (yet bracing) element. The
texture—rising from the connotations of “contagious hospital” to the vital
“surge of the blue,” lapsing back into the passivity of “mottled clouds
driven,” and rising again to the active force now defined, “a cold wind”—
enacts in little the larger texture of the poem. For there is now a lapse into
“waste,” “standing and fallen,” and the yet more fragmentary notation of
inert or passively moved “standing water” and “scattering of tall trees.”
Yet endurance and vitality lurk in those verbal forms, which will lead to
the next upsurge of movement toward clear definition (through “reddish /
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy”), only to relapse again into the
indeterminate “stuff” and the specification of objects dead or dormant. After
these preliminary movements the pattern itself can emerge into explicit
statement—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—

only to relapse into a less bold personification:

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter.

However, the connotations of “hospital” have now shifted from disease to
birth; and the proleptic “they” fits the pattern of syntactical emergence
established by the first sentence fragment. We now look forward in more
intense anticipation; yet, even after the “objects are defined” (first the generic