20 pages • 40-minute read
Approach of Winter
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Literary Devices
Form
The form in “Approach to Winter” is more organic and subversive than form in traditional poems. Williams offers 11 lines, none made up of more than five words, each line with varying length. The poem thus creates a contradiction that was before Whitman (one of Williams’s most important influences) inconceivable in poetry: a deliberately conceived, carefully executed, and entirely haphazard form.
The irregular form invites creative speculation in ways that more conventional forms do not. In a poem that looks at the vulnerability of nature as winter approaches, what better way to approximate that helplessness than to put a short poem on a page overwhelmed by dead white space. The lines move out and move back with irregular energy, like the brittle branches of trees being moved to and fro by the late fall wind. The end-punctuation, or lack of it, gives the poem, despite its lack of rhythm or rhyme, a kind of momentum that itself suggests the hard approach of winter. The poem itself provides few end-stops; the enjambment capturing the quiet anxiety over how winter approaches with cunning directness, there is no stopping it. The poem’s briefest line, Line 8, records the sad surrender of the leaves to the logic of falling. But nature will not accept the implications of winter’s deadness. Fittingly, the poem’s longest line (Line 9) captures the thin evidence of animation in this late autumn world, the spikes of color from the hardy flowers that edge the dead garden bed. The form then recreates nature’s own resistance to stillness, its own guerilla counteroffensive against winter.
Meter
Traditional metrics defines both the manipulation of syllables to create a percussive feeling of beat when the poem is read aloud and the collision of similarly sounding words to create striking patterns of rhyme. “Approach of Winter” has at best scant meter, a kind of faint pulse. The poem has phrasing, certainly, but not meter. Its lines haphazardly sustain iambic trimeter, that is, each line has six beats, three units of stressed and unstressed syllables. But this is not insistent—the meter stumbles and thus can easily be overlooked. That meter is organic to the poem’s subject matter. It would seem disingenuous to have a poem about nature’s struggle against winter be compelled by peppy beats and catchy rhymes. Certainly, in a poem positioned on that threshold moment when nature begins to surrender to the apparent death in winter’s approach, the poem has a faint pulse, one that has to be searched for to be heard. Only within Williams’s careful manipulation of words does the poem achieve a subtle rhythm, a quiet sonic cooperation that creates the feeling of a poem.
Each line, each word then lends itself to metric patterning, phrasing that in turn rewards recitation that is quiet, reflective, even anxious. In Line 1, for instance, in the words “half stripped trees”—the poem uses the long “e” vowel, the soft “h,” and the sibilant “s” to capture the soft hush of approaching sleep. The poet resists the grammatically-correct hyphen in the adjective as the hyphen would invite speedy delivery by bridging the words. Without the hyphen, the recitation hinges on the difficult gap between “half” and “stripped,” invites lingering over the terror of that sudden white space. The next line shakes awake to explode in the crazy hard consonants of the word “struck” (Line 2), a word. The fricative “k” cannot be read without aural violence, and the line ends in the strangely out of place word “together” (Line 2), an adverb with no clear adjective or verb to give it purpose. Every line, every word invites metric exploration.
In this way, line by line the poem’s idiosyncratic metrics create theme, engender mood, and ultimately recreate in language and sonic subtleties the very landscape it attempts to capture.
Voice
The simplest analysis of the poem’s voice is to observe the obvious: There is no voice. There is no context sufficient to define who is actually sharing this image. There is no conversation dynamic; there is no setting that might suggest what gave rise to the observation. The delivery, quietly rich with subtle sonic manipulations and sly wordplay, is nevertheless hard, objective. There are no interfering quotation marks. There is not even the reassuring structure of a complete idea. To give the poem a specific voice, then, would be to compromise the premise of the poem itself—no ideas, nothing, just the thing.
Readers yearn for a voice to speak to them; without that comforting dynamic, reading itself can be lonely. That school of thought compels the voice here to be Williams himself, or more specifically Dr. William Carlos Williams, pediatrician on staff at Passaic General Hospital near Rutherford, New Jersey. In this scenario, however, we have defined a voice and, in turn, reduced the power of the poem. If this had been Williams’s intention, he surely would have crafted that context.
For Williams, then, defining voice limits a poem. Liberating the poem from the reassuring (and entirely unnecessary) device of a voice opens up the poem: It is at once earnestly serious and wickedly subversive, the poet both there and not there, both intrinsic to the poem and irrelevant to it. In this, the freedom from voice captures the desperate optimism of Williams’s Imagism—in the end, what we have are the trees and those salvia petals and the wind, and they will sustain, they will suffice.
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