20 pages • 40 minutes read
Approach of Winter
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Themes
Live in Expectation of Wonder
In “Approach to Winter,” the poet elects not to subject the accidental arrangement of trees, leaves, and garden he sees to layers of meaning. Instead, the poet shares the images rather than explain, making the poem less about the natural world’s slow edge into winter and more about that resilient energy of wonder, a gift not just of poets but of everyone with a grasping imagination, everyone with an eye upon which nothing is lost.
The theme then is for each of us to live in expectation of similar moments, moments unforced, unexpected, moments when the world all around us suddenly, mysteriously but clearly speak to us. They are not necessarily beautiful moments —the arrangement here is harsh, even forbidding—and not necessarily only in nature—Williams would also dedicate poems to a green glass bottle shattered in a city alley, a noisy fire engine roaring down the street, the light of a streetlamp clouded by moths. Those moments are our right, and in a contemporary world where thoughts of the afterlife can seem confusing and obsolete, those moments snatched can be heaven-enough. Not opening up to even the expectation of wonder, then, can be hell-enough.
Death is Never the Last Word
As a practicing doctor for close to 40 years, Williams understood the reality of death—but his practice centered on pediatrics, on children. Thus, professionally, he could not allow death to be the absolute parameter it seems to be to those souls who spend their lives fretting over the moment “is” becomes “was.” Williams, as a trained scientist, gathered data—looking about him, whether in the hospital, in the town of Rutherford, in the open fields of the Garden State where he lived, and the conclusion was inevitable. Nothing in his practice, nothing in the hospital where he worked, nothing in the streets of Rutherford, nothing in the sprawling fields about town, nothing concluded, ever.
Williams does not offer simplistic optimism—the whole half-empty/half-full argument: are the trees half stripped or are they half-leafed? Rather, he accepts the reality of winter, does not try to deny its integrity, power, or grandeur. If the poem acknowledges nature’s movement into winter then the poem also acknowledges the urgent rhythm of nature itself, nature that will never accept the premise of extinction. Thus, the brittle leaves gather in a dead and dormant garden that is lined nevertheless with hardy perennials, ornamental flowers grown specifically because they are both low maintenance and resilient, able to stay bright and colorful long after the garden itself has gone dormant. Dormant, the poet reminds us, but hardly dead. Bare but waiting, expectant.
As breathtaking theories in the new physics were just beginning to suggest, the cosmos is a complex, ever-whirling energy field. Those spikes of color in the salvias and the carmines, that dormant garden settling into winter but anticipating the spring, even those brittle leaves which refuse to surrender to the autumn wind, all suggest that winter approaches, but it carries with it the reminder that death is never the last word. Thus, the poem for all its stark imagery is optimistic in the only way a good doctor is ever genuinely optimistic: by being realistic.
Constant, Spirited Communication with Nature
Williams came of age in the post-World War I generation of individuals who grandly dubbed themselves the Lost Generation. Those of the Lost Generation fancied themselves survivors of an apocalyptic world war that had taken more than 40 million casualties, left Europe decimated, and made ironic the idea of Western civilization. They took particular measure of humanity’s separation from nature as one of the cornerstone malignancies of the contemporary world.
Inevitably, according to the artists of Williams’s era, the city had emerged as the go-to reference point for culture. Given the city’s claustrophobic network of streets, traffic, factories, and skyscrapers, humanity had inevitably and irretrievably lost contact with the vitality, serenity, and beauty of nature, gone not to return. In addition, new age theories in the earth sciences and in physics had long ago disenchanted nature and had reduced it to an efficient system of predictable laws that left nature about as mysterious as a light switch, as beautiful as a clockwork, as interesting as a traffic light. In addition, that generation surveyed the rural landscapes of Europe and saw only the impact of close to 10 years of brutal warfare, with fields, farms, orchards, entire countrysides blasted into blackened craters, an anything-but-symbolic wasteland that appeared to endorse elaborate hand-wringing and jeremiads bemoaning the death of nature itself.
Williams simply did not buy into such rhetoric. When Williams returned from his stint in Paris to begin his residency as a pediatrician in New Jersey, he could not share that apocalyptic sense. Nor did he see science as the enemy. Nature was not—really could not be—destroyed by even humanity’s most determined and careless efforts to destroy each other. Its mysteries could not be reduced to formulas and cool expectations. Nature rather offered the open eye a radiant sense of beauty. The “Approach of Winter” reveals that shimmering beauty in trees losing their leaves. By taking nature’s stuff and elevating it into lines of chiseled poetry, Williams defies his own generation and reminds his readers that nature cannot be exhausted, that the wasteland was a concoction of the intellect not a product of nature. In turn, Williams offers a lesson as old as Ecclesiastes: the earth abides forever.
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By William Carlos Williams
