William Carlos Williams: “By the road to the contagious hospital”

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

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

These are, for me, dark times. I have been reading a book about composers, and how they dealt with the phenomenon we call ‘Naziism.’ I probably should not be reading it right now: It is rife with how insidious the Nazi program was, seeking to bring people within its antisemitic worldview. Oppose, and you are destroyed: Forced into exile, made stateless, sent to a concentration camp. Assent (if you are not Jewish, since Jews were not considered persons, or salvageable), and state recognition and rewards are your portion.

Here is a short poem by Bertholt Brecht.

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.

In my view, this is a dark time: In speaking of poems, I should be speaking of poems about dark times. But poetry goes as it will, not always responding the way we want it to respond. (Wallace Stevens concludes an early poem, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” with these lines: “But fictive things wink/ As they will. Wink most when widows wince.”) Accordingly, strangely, I will discuss William Carlos Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital,” which is a poem of new beginnings, perhaps even a poem of hope. I am not very optimistic in the current situation, but I choose to look at Williams’s great poem nonetheless.

Before we begin, a few words about “hope.” An old friend posted on his FaceBook page, in the wake of Trump’s election, “Please do not tell me to keep hope alive.” He was urging his friends not to retreat to empty platitudes, and in that way he was right.

But hope – and this Williams poem is in a sense about hope – is something we need, even in the dark times. I’ve always thought the famous Emily Dickinson poem about hope was mushy and sentimental, but now I am not so sure:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Hope, she tells us, endures in the hardest times, singing, singing without stop. It asks nothing, but keeps us, well, “warm.” These times are dark, darker I fear than many know: We have as a people chosen to follow, and give power to, a man who admires Hitler, wishes for generals who have the blind loyalty of Hitler’s generals, wants concentration camps, wants mass deportations, wants to punish his enemies, speaks of other humans as “vermin,” thinks some people genetically are inferior and less-than-human.

[To speak of the temporal, and specifically of contemporary circumstances following the re-election of Donald Trump, we need, I think, to focus on central things: Not personalities in his Cabinet nor tariffs to rejuvenate American manufacturing and replace progressive income taxes. No, to my mind the ‘real’ things going on at this moment are two: A power play over control of the military, and the bending of the media and corporate leaders by a President whose vindictiveness is both proclaimed and validated by past actions. When the Washington Post scrapped an editorial supporting Kamala Harris because Jeff Bezos was worried about his billions of federal contracts should Trump become President, the writing was on the wall: The media and the wealthy would indeed be bullied by the prospect of a President who demands retribution for opposing him. As for the military, Trump, even before assuming the Presidency, has made clear that his top generals must be loyal to him or be shoved aside. Fascism will dominate our everyday lives. Accordingly, he has set up a new procedure to ‘vet’ generals – and to decide which generals get promoted. Danger, danger.

What we choose defines us, and Donald Trump will define us. We are now ‘Good Germans.’]

“By the road to the contagious hospital” has affected me more than any other poem. In that sense, I believe it is my favorite poem. I have learned greatly from this poem. (All poems should teach us to see what we do not see, or to see clearly what is inchoate and, being subjective, what seems somehow fuzzy and beneath our capacity to recognize it.) This poem, as we shall see, insists that we look at the world about us, look intensely, and see what is there. To know the place in which we live and by that knowing to better know ourselves. I cannot say, quite literally cannot say, how deep and abiding is the knowledge (wisdom?) I have gained from this poem. This poem has transformed my life.

It has taught me, by example and not precept, how important it is to be in the moment in which we are, to see – really see – what is there to be seen if only we choose to look closely and without preconceiving what will be there to be seen.

First published as the opening to his most experimental book, Spring and All, it has achieved life as an independent poem. In my view, it is the great poem of America’s twentieth century. Here is its first line:

By the road to the contagious hospital

Let’s not go too fast. What we learn from that first line is that there is a road, and his attention is focused on what is “by” that road. I imagine he is driving a car, though maybe he has stopped driving and has pulled aside on the roadside. In any event, he looks at what is beside him, he in his car, insulated, in some relation (coming? going?) to a hospital which is contagious. Let me put aside what the “contagious” refers to until we get to the last portion of the poem.

That is the material, the donné, of the poem. What is beside the road is the “stuff” (he will use that term) of the poem. We drive through the world, as we move through the world, ignoring most of what is beside us. Eyes forward, looking at what is ahead, not paying any attention to what we are in the midst of. Here we have the gist of the poem, though we will keep looking at it because that ‘gist’ is so gorgeous – and revealing.

The next seven lines reveal the milieu in which the narrator of the poem is driving. Blue sky above, clouds, wind, “broad muddy fields” replete with weeds and small pools of water, trees. Barren words stand out: “cold…waste…muddy…patches…scattering.”

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

As he says in another poem, “A Woman in Front of Bank,” “there you/ have it.” An unexceptional landscape, less than picturesque. Mud, weeds, scraggly vegetation, with a cold wind blowing over it all.

If we are attentive, we note that the following line begins with a capitalized “All.” The poem is about to recapitulate itself, to establish once again that this is a profoundly unpoetical landscape.

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

I love that run of five adjectives – “reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy” – leaving us as readers poised before they tumble into the word which means, well, nothing: “stuff.” Here is the entire poem in miniature, close observation of what is otherwise just “stuff.” Small trees, bushes, brown leaves on the ground, vines without leaves. Dead and ugly. Not the ‘stuff’ out of which poems are made. Garbage.

Williams says, in a late poem called “To All Gentleness:”

And they speak,
Euphemistically, of the anti-poetic!
Garbage. Half the world ignored . . .

When we substitute foreknowledge, depending on what we have always known, for the actuality in which we live, we dismiss what is actually around us. We often call what is before or around us “garbage,” or unimportant, or irrelevant, or discardable, and so we are rendered incapable of seeing what is actually there. “Half the world ignored.” Williams, in a stunning way in this poem, will reclaim and redeem the “garbage” that we ignore.

To return to “By the road to the contagious hospital:” We have now read just short of half of the poem, thirteen of its twenty-seven lines, and what we have twice encountered is a miniscule wasteland, a landscape in a very minor key. No one, save Williams, focuses on such a thing by itself.

But the poem turns, turns on a strange internal rhyme, leafless/lifeless, and as it turns, we notice that it is “lifeless [only] in appearance.”

leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

For what is happening, he realizes as he observes closely, is that the season is turning. Spring may come slowly (“sluggish”) and so minutely that we are not aware of its approach (“dazed”), but spring is coming. ( I am reading “dazed: here, as referring to the observer/reader. But the word primarily refers to the slow and hesitant way in which spring displaces winter.) Perhaps spring is not fully here – it “approaches” – but this is no longer a winter landscape, even if everything is brown and seemingly dead. Underneath those dead leaves, new shoots are preparing to emerge.

What follows the dash is the emergence of, the entrance of, new life. At this point, it should be noted, the “They” of the sentence refers not only to the new vegetation but also to the new births that are occurring in the “contagious hospital.” As the succeeding wondrous lines indicate, babies too are born into a cold world (in that “contagious” hospital):

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.

Now, in the poem, another ‘entrance,’ another birth, is taking place. Not just those infants in the hospital. (Williams was a doctor, a general practitioner, and delivered hundreds of babies) The poet is closely observing his world. Not just ‘garbage,’ not just “dead, brown leaves,” but something else: A world in which the vegetation is renewing itself.

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

As he looks closely at what is “by the road,” as the first line stipulated, he sees the first sprigs of vegetation, and notices that beneath the leaf-mold other vegetation is preparing to emerge. And this is happening even if the vestiges of winter still surround him and the nascent vegetation:

All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

In a very famous poem, “Ode to the West Wind,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (I have written about this poem, and if you want to read that letter, type in ‘Gutman Shelley West’), the British poet closed with these famous lines:

O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley wanted an impetuous wind to blow him from despondency to agency, and to propel a dying world into a dynamic new order. In Williams’s poem, it is not the wind – “the cold familiar wind” – that ushers in spring. It is the world itself that is renewing. Only people used to seeing what they are accustomed to seeing, “dead, brown leaves under them/leafless vines,” cannot see what is actually happening: That the world is being reborn.

Too many of us, too much of the time, do not observe closely the world in which we live. In addition to the two births we have already noted – the birth of new vegetation, the babies being born in the contagious hospital – another birth is taking place, the birth of the poet’s perception. Yes, life ‘quickens,” a word used to describe the beginning of new life in the womb. So do the plants. But so, too, does the poet’s capacity to see things:

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—

Having looked closely and seen the first shoots of new grass, the curled wild carrot (Queen Anne’s lace) leaves under the leaf-mulch, he can see a stately process by which spring vegetation is emerging. “One by one objects are defined.” This defining occurs both in actuality, and in his perception as he recognizes that ‘something’ is going on. Spring is being born. (The word “quickens” is one which refers not just to the increasing pace in which spring is revealing itself, but also to the movement of a fetus as the new life within a woman’s womb begins. And, here, to the poet’s perception, his recognition that there is more to see than a dead wasteland.)

The next phrase, “clarity, outline of leaf” refers both to the sure outlines of the new vegetation, but also to the poet’s increasing perception of what is going on in those muddy fields beside the road he has travelled on. “Still,” it is the moment of transition, when “the stark dignity of entrance” occurs (or is recognized). This transition is what he focuses on. New life, new sight. As Yeats says referring to another circumstance, “All is changed, changed utterly.”

Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Change, entrance, rootedness. What the poem is documenting is that moment when life – in the muddy fields, in the “contagious hospital,’ in the arena of vision of the poet – begins to awaken.

I’ve skipped that term, “they/ grip down.” It is in the rootedness in the world, in the actual world and not the world we assume is out there, that we too find our grip, that we (if we are open to perception) know the place we are in and who we are.

I know it seems paltry, this emphasis on being aware of where we are, on what is occurring. But it is not paltry at all; too often we ignore or dismiss the actuality of being in favor of what we want to see or choose to see.

For fifty years, I was a teacher. My students did not see the swelling of tree buds in late February; they did not see the grass begin to green as the first warming rays of sun stimulated the growth beneath their feet. I know because when I would point these things out to them, no one was ever aware of life recommencing. But as they shrugged on their winter parkas, as they trudged out with warm boots on their feet, I knew that if they chose – and after reading this poem, perhaps they were ready to choose – they might see how the physical world about them was renewing itself. If they bent down to the earth and pushed aside the dry dead grass of last year, they too could see small green shoots begin to appear.

In the small things of life we can see, if we but choose to look closely, the beginnings of change. So I would tell my students to push aside the small patches of remaining snow, to push aside the brown remains of last year’s grass, and see what was emerging from the earth.

I told them that William Carlos Williams teaches us to see what is actually there, all around us, all before us.

It can be true for each of us: “rooted, they/ grip down and begin to awaken.” Williams had a poet friend, Wallace Stevens, whom he occasionally met in New York City. Stevens wrote, and I am certain Williams would agree, “The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”

Williams teaches us to see that physical world, and by seeing, to understand that we can find not only the world, but ourselves. Our selves are rooted in our perceptions, if we can see clearly without our preconceptions, see what is actually in front of (or beside) us.

It is a great American Transcendental truth, seen most clearly in Emerson’s essay “Nature,” that every natural fact is a symbol of a spiritual fact. The world can re-awaken, as we can re-awaken if we open our eyes. As Emerson’s friend Thoreau wrote, in the conclusion to Walden:

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Last night, at a dinner honoring a friend and colleague who was retiring, a woman at my table talked about the importance to her of Transcendental Meditation™, which taught her to live in the moment. I was a bit put out by her glib assertion of ‘living in the moment.’ For although this is what Williams shows us in “By the road to the contagious hospital,” a major part of what I have learned so powerfully from reading this poem, it is not all: He wants us to see something more. If we live in the moment and do not shed our preconceptions about what we see, we only see that which we are accustomed to seeing. We see “broad, muddy fields,” and not the spring that is emergent.

This shedding of preconceptions is essential. We must confront what is there, not what we think is there.

Avoiding preconceptions. Being perceptive is not a matter of having the intelligence to see what is ‘beneath the surface,’ nor is it an awareness of the present. It is that great capacity, so often ignored by most of us most of the time, to slough off what we think we see to encounter what is actually there. Beneath seeming appearances – those “dead, brown leaves” – there is “clarity… dignity… profound change.” When we move past appearances, we can be “rooted’ in the things of the world, and so we can “begin to awaken.”

Abandoning what we think we see, and actually looking at the world that is there before us, is miraculous. Williams tells us this; “By the road to the contagious hospital” shows us that, by looking at is what is actually there, we can remake ourselves and our sense of who and where we are.

This is hard work. It is so easy to live in the world which we have pre-conceived, to see what we have seen so often before. “By the road to the contagious hospital” reveals to us that clear sight promises “the stark dignity of/entrance:” The encounter with what is outside of ourselves allows us, forces us, to “grip down and begin to awaken.” So new beginnings mark the emergence of babies from the birth canal, herald the renewal coterminous with the first appearance of spring, and accompany our wondrous capacity to see what is actually happening in this world we live in.

As I wrote a few sentences ago, it is miraculous.