The changing of the seasons is a dramatic, even epical phenomenon realized nevertheless through a quiet process of remarkably undramatic moments. William Carlos Williams’s “Approach of Winter” (1921) captures such a dramatically undramatic moment. Appropriately, the poem itself seems a trifling sort of almost-poem, a spare 11 lines, no line more than five words. Visually, the poem is a handful of printed words set against the intimidating stark white of an otherwise blank page. And those words do not even find their way to the reassurance of a complete sentence.

The poem is a gathering of observations, a juxtaposition of images--the bare trees, the brittle leaves, a bare flower garden edged with decorative plants of vivid colors--those fragments, snatched from an otherwise neutral landscape, have left the poet feeling autumn edging into winter. By focusing on the dead, brittle leaves that seem unwilling to let go of the branches, the poem suggests that anxious, fragile moment when a vibrant fall quietly surrenders to the dead-grip of winter. As such, “Approach of Winter” represents a short-lived but highly provocative genre of early 20th-century poetry termed by its own practitioners as Imagism, poetry that freed the poet to create a mood or an idea solely through such spare snapshots, the careful and direct presentation of things observed.

Poet Biography

William Carlos Williams was born 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, about 20 minutes from Manhattan. Early on a voracious reader, Williams nevertheless committed his education to the sciences, completing a medical degree at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he met Ezra Pound, himself a struggling poet and student of languages who was just beginning to appreciate the opportunities to reinvent literature offered by the movement, self-styled as Modernism, which was then sweeping Europe. Even as Williams returned to Rutherford and began what would be a nearly 40-year career as a physician, specializing in pediatric care, he began experimenting with his perception of poetry informed as much by the revolutionary manifestoes of Modernism that called for radical, avant-garde expression in the arts as by his own fascination with the free verse music and complex rhythms he heard in the poetry of fellow New Jerseyite Walt Whitman, a towering figure in the liberation of American literature from European models.

Maintaining his anchorage in the day-to-day busyness of being a doctor, Williams sought in his poetry, published in limited circulation magazines and chapbooks to a small, if enthusiastic readership, to celebrate distinctly American subjects in a verse line that reflected the language patterns and subtle music of conversational American English. For more than two decades, his unconventional poetry struggled to find a readership. Williams himself helped finance the publication of Sour Grapes, the 1921 collection in which “Approach of Winter” first appeared. His poetry did not look like poetry, did not read like poetry, did not scan like poetry. His poems defied what he regarded as the increasingly esoteric Modernist experiments whose deliberate complexities, he said, alienated rather than invited readers. His poetry, influenced by the guerilla movement known as Imagism, led in part by Pound himself, rejected the notion that poetry tangle with complex ideas and philosophical abstracts (Williams was particularly put-off by the widespread critical praise lavished on T. S. Eliot’s ponderous and erudite The Waste Land). Rather, he felt poetry should embrace the world all about and share that enthusiasm and that near-spiritual sense of its vitality in poems that stripped lines down to critical simplicity and, in rejecting rhythm and rhyme as harsh and enslaving, used subtle sonic dynamics to create a compelling auditory effect.

Few of his patients even knew Williams was a published poet. Although Williams enjoyed a long career as a poet, his work would wait until the mid-1950s and the Beat movement to find at last an appreciative audience. The Beats reveled in Williams’s complex simplicity given their own celebration of the music of open verse and their sense of the spiritual energy in simplicity informed by Eastern rather than Western thought. That generation found a profound influence in Williams’s gentle and unaffected joy in the delights of the world and in his meticulous crafting of each line. His 1963 collection Pictures from Brueghel was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize just weeks before Williams died quietly in his sleep at age 79.

Poem Text

The half stripped trees    

struck by a wind together,  

bending all,  

the leaves flutter drily 

and refuse to let go  

or driven like hail  

stream bitterly out to one side

and fall 

where the salvias, hard carmine,—  

like no leaf that ever was—

edge the bare garden.

Williams, William Carlos. “Approach of Winter.” 1921. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

It is at once simple to summarize Williams’s brief poem—trees are losing their leaves in late autumn—and impossible. There is no narrative as such, no characters, action, suspense, specific setting, specific time, tidy theme, or moral. There is really no speaker or offer of intimacy that makes for a comfortable reading. Rather, the poem offers a single moment of observation—the image of a tree in autumn threatened by winter and surrendering quietly, if reluctantly, to the inevitable change of seasons.

The poem begins with trees half-stripped of their leaves by a bracing wind, with winter imminent. The focus then moves to the leaves that cling to the branches, that “refuse to let go” (5), a personification of the leaves. The leaves that “flutter daily” (Line 4) downward, however, reveal the impending sense of winter’s too-fast approach. The leaves don’t fall gently but in a hard and constant shower that is likened to a hailstorm (Line 6). They gather “bitterly” (Line 7) on the ground about the tree. The dry and brittle leaves that “stream bitterly” (Line 7) along the ground fall nevertheless about flowers, the salvias and the carmine. Both are hardy perennials that resist the approach of winter.