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William Carlos WilliamsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Due to the poem’s simplicity and concision, it appears to invite, really demand creative interactions in the understandable urge to find some meaning, what readers have been doing with (and to) poetry since Antiquity. Williams’s poem has generated largely two schools of thought that each seek to burden exactly what the spare poem itself seemingly resists: the heavy weight of meaning.
To some, because the poem is set near a hospital, it speaks to the tension between life and death. After all, Williams himself was a practicing pediatrician and, as a routine element of his professional career, worked daily within that difficult dynamic. For Williams, then, the poem, set in that deserted alley on a dark night, captures a moment when death seems everywhere triumphant. Perhaps he has retreated to this back wing of the hospital to momentarily escape the pressing business of attending to his patients’ often heroic struggles to stay alive. Or perhaps he is in the back wing outside the hospital because he has just lost a patient or perhaps has delivered a bleak diagnosis and now struggles to recoup some kind of optimism.
In this reading, the alley space seems death soaked, a space “where / nothing / will grow” (Lines 3-5).
By William Carlos Williams
Approach of Winter
Approach of Winter
William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
In the American Grain
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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Paterson
Paterson
William Carlos Williams
Spring and All
Spring and All
William Carlos Williams
Spring Storm
Spring Storm
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The Red Wheelbarrow
The Red Wheelbarrow
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The Young Housewife
The Young Housewife
William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say
This Is Just to Say
William Carlos Williams
To Elsie
To Elsie
William Carlos Williams
To Waken An Old Lady
To Waken An Old Lady
William Carlos Williams