Spring and All. William Carlos Williams

spring by Stinking River where a magnolia tree, without leaves, before what was once a farmhouse, now a ramshackle home for millworkers, raises its straggling branches of ivorywhite flowers.

      Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us — tomorrow, we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry ! Why bother for this man or that ? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care ? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem.

      Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings ? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown, orange, black, grey ? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what I am plagiarising) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed.

      The new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide : Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life’s austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees.

      CHAPTER VI

      Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlayed, remained hidden.

      It is spring ! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

      Good God !

      Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceeded in the dead ages gone by. A perfect plagiarism results. Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived.

      At this point the entire complicated and laborious process begins to near a new day. (More of this in Chapter XIX) But for the moment everything is fresh, perfect, recreated.

      In fact now, for the first time, everything IS new. Now at last the perfect effect is being witlessly discovered. The terms „ veracity ” „ actuality ” „ real ” „ natural ” ,, sincere ” are being discussed at length, every word in the discussion being evolved from an identical discussion which took place the day before yesterday.

      Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recreated everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was. Now indeed men look about in amazement at each other with a full realization of the meaning of „ art ”.

      CHAPTER 2

      It is spring : life again begins to assume its normal appearence as of „ today ”. Only the imagination is undeceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern forests stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no attention to it).

      CHAPTER XIX

      I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence and that nothing much is contained in any one of them but no one should be surprised at this today.

      THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM

      It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING.

      In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa under the stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a second until he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs — In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias’ frizze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years — In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements — at last SPRING is approaching.

      In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second time at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species Homo sapiens occured.

      Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past — is approaching the end.

      Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW.

      I

      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 then : rooted they

      grip down and begin to awaken

      II

      Pink confused with white

      flowers and flowers reversed

      take and spill the shaded flame

      darting it back

      into the lamp’s horn

      petals aslant darkened with mauve

      red where in whorls

      petal lays its glow upon petal

      round flamegreen throats

      petals radiant with transpiercing light

      contending

      above

      the leaves

      reaching up their modest green

      from the pot’s