[After a mild
start, it ended up being a long, cold, wintry winter. But all winters end, metaphorically
as well as seasonally, and in this week’s series I’ll be AmericanStudying a few
cultural and historical such American thaws—leading up to a weekend post on one
of our most recent warmings.]
On the two
modernist poems that exemplify alternative, contrasting, yet ultimately complementary
narratives of spring and hope.
When it comes to
literary images of spring, the first work that (pardon me) springs to mind is
William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All”
(1923). Created at least in part in response to Williams’ work
as a doctor (hence the “contagious hospital” in the opening line), and more
exactly his experiences dealing with at-risk young patients whose very
existence and future were in doubt, the poem transcends any specific contexts
to become both a realistic and yet an idealistic depiction of spring itself: of
what it means for new life to make its struggling, haphazard, threatened,
perennial, inspiring journey to the surface of a world that had been cold and
lifeless (in terms of blooming things, anyway) only days before. Making the
best use of an unpunctuated last line since Emily Dickinson, Williams’ closing
line captures perfectly the precise moment of “awaken[ing],” as both an
uncertain transition to whatever comes next yet also a miraculous achievement
in its own right.
Williams at
times consciously positioned himself and his poetry in
contrast to high modernist contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, and it’s difficult
to imagine a more direct contrast to “Spring and All” than the opening lines of
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). “April is the cruelest month,” Eliot’s
poem begins, and in case the reader thinks he’s upset about Tax Day or
something, the speaker goes on to make clear that it is precisely spring’s
rebirths to which he refers: “Breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing /
Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm,
covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”
Where Williams’ poem focuses on the season’s partial and uncertain but still powerful
moves toward a future, Eliot’s thus looks back at a past, one that would be
better left buried yet that is instead brought back with every new blossom. And
where Williams creates images of awakening new life, of spring as birth, Eliot
portrays the season as a painful re-awakening, back into identities already (it
seems) too much in the world.
Those contrasts
are genuine, and again reflect more overarching distinctions between these two
poets as well. Yet I think in at least one significant way the two poems
(particularly when we take all of Eliot’s into consideration, not just his
opening line) complement rather than contrast each other. After all, one clear
way to describe the modernist literary project is as an attempt to
represent life in the aftermath of disaster, destruction, death, doubt, all
those characteristics so amplified within a post-WWI world. To that end, we can
see both poems’ speakers as struggling with that question, and trying to
imagine whether and how new life and possibilities can or should emerge into
such an inhospitable world (whether represented through a contagious hospital
or a barren wasteland). The poems do differ greatly in tone, but it’s possible
to argue that the very act of writing is in both cases a hopeful one, a pushing
through the wintry ground into some evolving new form. “These fragments I have
shored against my ruins,” Eliot writes in his poem’s final lines—and what is
spring (he said at the tail end of a New England winter) but a fragmentary yet
inspiring annual rebirth of a ruined world?
Next thaw
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other thaws you’d highlight?
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