148 PA RT T W O
“In the composition,” he says, “the artist does exactly what every eye must
do with life.” Sketching in his canvas—“By the road... under the surge... All
along the road... under them”—Williams adds daubs of shape, color, texture,
and even smell, rank “muddy fields” and “standing water.” Under wind-driven
clouds the land appears inert, poor “stuff,” yet bristling with the ways adjec-
tives can take form: “purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy.” Most telling of all:
among jagged phrasings for fifteen lines, no main verb snags the viewer’s eye
until “leafless” modulates to “Lifeless” and midway through the time of this
poem, “sluggish / dazed spring approaches—”
“They enter the new world naked,” so raw we can’t tell whether “They” are
plant life or newborn infants. A translation by Octavio Paz reads Entran en el
mundo desnudos, “They enter the world naked.” Was Mexico’s spokespoet, on be-
half of the continent ’s indigenous peoples, doubting this “newworld”? Williams
had another priority: “at last SPRING is approaching” after our dead-time
spent copying the European past, he says in Spring and All. “THE WORLD
IS NEW.”
Organic uprising rings like revolutionary speech:
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
We ’ve seen that stiff curl of Queen Anne ’s lace in the ground or the flower
shop, but have we saidit so as to see it afresh? What grips the mind ’s eye is a
tension between “curl” and “stiff ” (he added that adjective later), a charged
energy caught in momentary stillness, growth taking shape, plus the compres-
sion of “wildcarrot” in one word. “One by one objects are defined,” says the
poet, getting a double sense from “defined”: identified and outlined, by nature
and the poet both.
The sixty-eight-year-old speaking this younger man’s lyric still bubbles with
excitement. After the poem’s fifth alerting dash we hear “It quickens,” which
fuses poetry’s with nature ’s work of quickening. Life around us quickens in
several ways: it warms up, pulsing more rapidly; the core or “quick” of things
wakens from death to life, as in “the quick and the dead”; new life stirs, the
fetus “quickens.”
Toward the end, through expectant line breaks, momentum still gathers with
each verb. Answering Eliot ’s feverish “What are the roots that clutch,” “Spring
and All” sees nature ’s renewable energy reaching deep into local ground with
no stop in sight: “rooted, they... ,” “rooted, they... ,”
rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken