[After a mild start, it ended up being a long, cold, very 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 crowd-sourced weekend post on what Spring means to you in literature, culture, history, and more!]
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 (and possibly, as I’ve argued
in recent years for obvious reasons, in specific response to his
experiences during the 1918-20 influenza pandemic), 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 (and, as we’ve now started to
realize, post-pandemic) 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?
No comments:
Post a Comment