The Meaning of Spring

Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams, in the light of current events.

The opening lines of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Waste Land, reference Chaucer’s Canterbury tales: "April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring. Dull roots with spring rain". Elliot’s The Waste Land subverts the idea of April as a month of renewal and rebirth, as depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer’s day, Spring was the time for pilgrimage. A traditional English pilgrimage paid homage to the Crusades. A pilgrimage is a journey to the east on foot, in a small or large company. Such a pilgrimage provides opportunities for Chaucer’s first-person narrators to tell their stories to pass the time while riding or walking. In Eliot's poem, April is a cruel month that marks the beginning of a cycle of sadness, failure, and hurt. But Williams responds to Eliot’s dreary depiction by presenting the Spring as a time of destruction and renewal. Spring is a time when things can be re-imagined and re-ordered.

I’m reading William Carlos Williams 1923 work Spring And All as a response to Elliot’s 1922 work The Waste Land. In Williams Spring and All, everything is, and is new. In the context of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Williams violent depictions are a little less jarring:

Does this seem like prescient language describing our world today, though it was written more than 100 years ago? It does to me. Not just the above quote, but the general tenor of Williams’s poem. We’re in a period of upheaval, destruction, and renewal, that corresponds to the renewal that was felt in the early 1920s, in the wake of WW1. That’s what leads to this sense of gleeful progress that ignores impacts on the people and environment around us, typical in the modern age. Why should we feel resonance with a post-war period that took place 100 years ago? Is there a war ending? It seems to me the hot part of the war is just arriving. The real resonance between the early 1920 and the 2020s is the social novelty presented in the situation. We’ve never been in a situation like this, where we can see the underpinnings of our corrupt institutions. And we’re starting to get the idea that our federal government is a foreign corporation organized for the explicit purpose of collecting a debt that we do not owe. That’s weird, man. Far out.

Spring is the time of cleansing fire. Fire is catching. The thicket of American ecclesiastical power has overgrown for generations now in the churches and universities. If one tree at Stanford or Harvard catches fire, it could light all the others up, too. This is akin to the legal process of discovery of crimes, where one leads to another. The trees (ecclesiastical powers) are tall and dry, and a good cleansing fire is only natural, and it’s only a matter of time. Reams and reams of the fictive writ of lawyers will serve as tender, and ignite this cloth, the smoke from which will make a big inky blot in the blue sky. I want to make it clear that I would prefer that all the priests, judges, and academic powers whose lineaments could burn would come out of their cloth before they catch fire. I know that there are good people wearing that cloth. Smoke from their censors is the traditional way that the priests send messages to the God above. I don’t think the smoke of the priests’ censors is penetrating through the dioxin and air pollution to the throne of God anymore, if it ever did.

Spring is the time, also, of war. It’s biblical: “In the spring, when the kings go off to war…” (2 Samuel 1:11). There are many reasons why the spring is the traditional time for war to break out. In the old days, everyone’s a farmer. A man could plant his fields and by the time the ground is dry enough to ride a horse and move artillery, the men would be ready to join up for whatever campaign offered itself. It seems to me as though this spring is going to be extra warlike. Clif High made this startling prediction earlier today:

“So sometime by the middle of April or so, we should start seeing lots and lots of people with open carry weapons. Just walking around the street with an AR-15 because you never know what the fuck's going to go on, right? Okay. And there will be far less prohibition of it and far less social stigma of it because of the situation that's ongoing with the spring offensive against the United States.” — Clif High (February 2, 2025)¹

It feels like war to me already. A refinery in Martinez, CA blew up yesterday, and the fire is still burning. They plan to use flaring to avoid a further explosion: https://contracosta.news/2025/02/02/bay-area-air-district-releases-report-on-martinez-refinery-fire/ If it seems like a coincidence to you that the refinery explosion and subsequent flaring, and release of toxins into the atmosphere, coincides with six days of continual rainfall in the Bay Area, I can assure you that it seems to me to be a terror attack with malice aforethought. Has it been a week since the biggest lithium battery plant in the world blew up on the coast, an hour north of here? Where I live, Vallejo, CA, is less than 10 miles from the Martinez refinery explosion and fire. In recent months, Vallejo has become a crime center of the Bay Area. We have sideshows, where youths shut down intersections and burn the rubber off of their stolen cars. Because Vallejo is accessible from several interstates, “the block,” as it is known in rapping circles, makes a great place to chop stolen cars, and for youths to congregate. The youthful element realizes that Vallejo only has six cops (I’m serious), and they use sideshows to create cover for crimes such as theft and burglary. I’m just saying, it’s rough out there.

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)

I think we’ve done a horrible job celebrating the 100th anniversary of the great works of the modern period. In presenting Spring And All, I’m trying to draw your attention to one brilliant flower among many. I’m sure some would question the relevance of reading a 100-year-old poem when the world is in such upheaval. I can assure you that it is, to me, utterly thrilling to read this work. I find it very engaging and worthwhile. I find so many connections to Blake and to my larger poetic literacy that it simply glows with meaning.

1. Spring Offensive