Good tidings to all! I thought I would change up the collage (above). I really like how the other one turned out, but the weather has been bleak, and I think we all needed some color and hints of spring. At least I did.

While I was gathering images, the poem “Spring and All…” by William Carlos Williams came to mind to accompany the theme. I haven’t read it since college, and was pleasantly surprised at the full title which I did not recollect — on the road to the contagious hospital. I did, in fact, remember that Williams was a doctor. Seems fitting for the current whatever.

I think I will put the full poem below for your pleasure. Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan poet, lent the title for this post; we are in agreement about the necessity of poetry. I, perhaps, take a more hedonistic view than Sydney’s solid Protestant one. That’s what makes a horse race my father would say. I think we would both agree that when all else fails, turn to poetry…or song lyrics. They are, essentially, the same thing. Or close kin. So here goes:

Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]

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 them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams.