Spring and All

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923)

Save for “Spring and All,” this haiku-like meditation is Williams’s most familiar poem. It was part of the same collection in which “Spring and All” appeared. The poem captures a snapshot moment, an image of white chickens gathered about a rain-dappled red wheelbarrow. As an exercise in pure Imagism, the short poem suggests more than it means and means more than it suggests.

“A Prayer in Spring” by Robert Frost (1915)

A contemporary of Williams, Frost takes a similar narrative premise as “Spring and All”: a sensitive poet grappling with the meaning of nature returning to life in the early spring after a cruel winter. Frost, however, eschews Williams’s enchantment over nature. The brooding Frost takes the return of spring into far darker implications than Williams argues. For Frost, the promise of spring tantalizes, but the speaker cannot find faith in the reanimation of the spring and, in the end, dismisses spring itself as a cruel mirage.

“A Light Exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson (written most likely in 1864; published in 1896)

Williams was part of the first generation of practicing poets introduced to the radical verse of Dickinson through its posthumous publication—Dickinson died just three years after Williams was born.