Spring and All

Posted by DJL on Mar 23, 2013 in Poetry | 1 comment

I have spent the last week in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, visiting family and friends we haven’t seen for too long. We were eager to escape the clutches of another long and cold Minnesota winter, if even for a few days, but chanced upon just the kind of spring William Carlos Williams describes in his poem “Spring and All.”

It’s been a cold spring here as well (“cold” being, of course, a relative state) and so there are not the usual beginnings of bloom dotting the countryside and lawns but rather the mottled clouds and broad and brown muddy fields Williams captures.

What’s been amazing to me, as we meandered through the Brandywine River Valley south and west of Philadelphia, is how beautiful it is, even in its most “unbeautiful” season, when winter only has only grudgingly begun to give way to spring. In the old Norse fairy tales this is the time of year when Mrs. Thaw sweeps up the remains of Old Man Winter to make room for Lady Spring. And that is what it looks like: winter may be past, but all is still cold and lifeless awaiting the return of spring and promise of new life.

Which is where we are in the liturgical year as well. If you have been reading one of the passion narratives for devotions or participating in Lenten services then you know we are near the end, when the story of Jesus seems to come to a tragic and most unpromising end. But that is an essential part of the Christian message – that death precedes new life, that the miracle of nature that brings buds forth from brown and dead things takes its shape from the greater miracle of resurrection, where God acts to interrupt death once and forever and assert the primacy of life and love.

So while it doesn’t quite feel like spring yet – either in frozen Minnesota or thawing Pennsylvania – yet we see the beauty in this barren moment for we trust the promise that new life is on the way.

 

Spring and All

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

William Carlos Williams, found in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939.