It was a hundred years ago — and so, in time, even the most modern of modern writers become the distant past — that William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) opened a 1923 collection of poetry and prose with the words “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue . . . ” And so Williams opens his book with the spring season of his book’s title, “Spring and All.” The most famous part of the book is the 22nd section, which contains Williams’s heavily anthologized — over-anthologized — poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But the first section of “Spring and All” captures something essential about his craft.

A medical doctor at Paterson, New Jersey, Williams gives us an image of spring as what he sees driving on the road to a hospital. First he sees the broad strokes: the sky, the muddy fields, “patches of standing water / the scattering of tall trees.” But then the rush of details emerges in the spring, like the quick flash of vision from a moving car: “the reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees.” The language become the language of birth as “It quickens.”

It’s hard to image a more accurate description of spring as the filling in of details than Williams’s line “One by one objects are defined.” And he concludes with the fullness of the season: “the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken.” The key may be to think of William Carlos Williams’s free verse as a form of poetry, though he thought of it as the rejection of form. In “Spring and All [‘By the road to the contagious hospital’]” the rush of the words matches the rush of scenery seen from a car, to give us the rush of wakening spring.

Spring and All
by William Carlos Williams

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

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.