Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods by William Logan

Author:William Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

smiled

to see the blandness

of the leaves—

so many

so lascivious

and still.134

It took another decade, until “This Is Just to Say” ended “so sweet / and so cold,” for Williams to give warmth to such blowsy rhetoric.135 On the rare occasions when he came close to reproducing the form of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in poems like “To a Mexican Pig-Bank,” “Between Walls,” and two or three others, the writing collapsed into slack lines and high-school banality.136

Does Spring and All mean “Spring and the Universal All,” “Spring and Everything That Follows,” “Spring Miscellany,” or, say, “Spring and All That Nonsense”? Only the last would pay real homage to the American demotic. (“I write in the American idiom,” Williams once remarked—or boasted.)137 The title goes at least this far: spring is present in fructifying possibility, with hints of resurrection and the defeat of death. “The Red Wheelbarrow” would be very different had the sequence been titled Winter and All. The scene would have become an abandoned barrow, chill rains, chickens soon to meet their fate, a world of dreariness and decay. Symbols are weathervanes—they point where the wind blows. Laid back into the sequence in which it appeared, the poem looks more didactic, achieving its depths through surface comprehensions.

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