Spring and All Mortality Quotes

This might seem a little unfair, since hospitals are places to get better, as well as to die. But, when you add the word "contagious?" Then, you follow it up with all that other death imagery in the poem? We’re off to a kind of death-obsessed start here.

Pretty grim here, too. No green, no life, just brown dead plants and mud. Starts to sound like the setting of a horror movie. What if our speaker is actually a diseased zombie, staggering away from the contagious hospital to feast on the brains of unsuspecting villagers? OK, as much fun as that would be, it would be a pretty big change for this poem – but at least they wouldn’t have to get new scenery.

Yup, more dead stuff. Since Williams repeats himself a bit here, we can guess he’s sending us a message. He really wants us to soak up this idea of a dead landscape. He wants us to see and feel how lifeless winter can be. He even uses a word, "leafless," that sounds really similar to "lifeless." If we really feel all of the weight of death at the beginning, then the turn towards life hits us even harder.

Here’s where the change starts to happen. He tells us again that the landscape is lifeless, but then he reminds us this is just an appearance. If death rules the first half of the poem, then the second half belongs to life. Behind all this dead stuff is the possibility of spring; death is just a mask for life. After this line, images of death pretty much disappear.