Approach of Winter

Analyzing Williams’s poem seems to threaten the poem’s very premise. At just 47 words, and those words, simple constructs of one or two syllables, not even managing to find their way to a complete sentence, the poem defies the excessive breadth of typical extended analysis, analysis that sometimes distracts from the poem’s insistence that suggestion is more powerful than explanation, subtlety more revealing than elucidation, feeling more persuasive than intellect.

The poet says in all but words: Here is an image I snatched from the sort of landscape that you regularly pass through but seldom notice; here is an image I felt. See it, feel it, or don’t. Or even better—don’t see mine but go out, eyes open, and see your own. In a poem that suggests more than it reveals and reveals more than it explains, the work of analysis is akin to ancient astronomers making sense of constellations. The poet here gives us six unrelated images: trees; wind; some leaves still on the branches; other leaves scattered on the ground below; a bare garden; and a border of still vibrant plants that edge it. Constellate away, he urges.

The images are themselves unrelated save that they share the same visual field of the poem. They are in the same frame shot much like the dots of light in a constellation that really share nothing but the umbrella of the night sky. The poem resists tidy and clear communication. Indeed, it even fractures itself—it never even finds its way to a complete grammatically-sound sentence. And the poet never intrudes to extract from the picture some elaborate theme. The poem not only does not invite analysis but resists it. It exists solely as a sinewy string of words that are themselves sonic delights, whose vowels and consonants play against each other in the ear, words that seek in their conciseness, their precision, their very minimalism to present nothing more—and nothing less—than a random collision of surfaces, an accidental choreography of lines, colors, shadows, motion, and shapes, a snapshot-moment that has struck the poet unexpectedly, apparently, in a moment of breathtaking consequence available not to us perhaps but surely to the poet.

The poem is thus an invitation: It shows readers something, but it doesn’t ask for that something to be explicated. Is there any wonder that for more than two decades, Williams struggled to find his readership and struggled against a critical establishment trained to expect poems to deliver meaning and reveal purpose? After all, is it not far easier to go out at night and trace the Big Dipper or recover Orion than to face the daunting task of constellating on your own?

Thus, the poem, despite being so clearly impersonal and even objective, makes an impassioned and very personal plea to an unsuspecting reader: Be one of those upon whom nothing is wasted. The poem then is less about what it means—the progress of the seasons—but rather about the unsuspected gift of awareness that everyone, not just poets, possesses to not just see the world but to interact with it, to let it inspire you, reshape you, shatter you with epiphanies no one else understands, epiphanies indeed designed for no one else but you.