Approach of Winter

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1921

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“Willow Poem” by William Carlos Williams (1921)

Included in Sour Grapes, “Willow Poem,” which comes immediately before “Approach of Winter” in the collection, is a kind of prelude to it. It captures the animation of the willow tree still in the throes of late summer. The willow still maintains its summer colors, “oblivious to winter” (Line 12), still enjoys the summer winds that herald the slow change of season. Williams here delights in immersing the poem in exact detailing, forsaking emotional indulgences and lyrical ornamentation of traditional nature poetry to present a picture of a willow tree on a late summer day.

“Tall Nettles” by Edward Thomas (1916)

An expression of the lean and stripped visual argument of Imagism, this brief lyric captures in clear and undecorated language the landscape of a rural farm, specifically the delight the poet feels when he sees nettles, resilient flowers, pushing through rusting farm implements. As with Williams’s poem, the poet slyly resists converting the image into some tidy lesson about, say, nature and time and mortality. Rather, the poem delights in the colors, lines, and unexpected collision of shapes and textures.

“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (1913)

To understand Imagism, the argument goes, begin with this iconic Pound exercise. A fragile, delicate couplet crafted by Pound, the philosophical force behind the rise of Imagism, the poem captures a moment in a Paris underground train station with its usual press of eager and hurried passengers that in a single, unexpected moment of impact urged the poet to record it, comparing the faces to petals of a tree. As with Williams’s verse (he was a college friend of Pound’s), the poem, at once ruthlessly objective and yet generously subjective, in its simplicity suggests rather than means.

Further Literary Resources

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford by Wendell Berry (2011)

Conceived not as a defense for Williams’s unconventional and experimental verse, this analysis, written by a respected poet and essayist, explores what Berry terms Williams’s “local adaptation,” that is how Williams’s heartfelt poetry reflected the world he knew best, the world about his native New Jersey. The study includes helpful chapters on Williams’s use of syntax and rhythm and his careful use of language, particularly his sense of long vowels and hard guttural consonants. The book pays particular attention to Williams’s early collections, among them Sour Grapes, in which Williams explored the landscapes of his native New Jersey.

“Metaphor in Selected Poems: William Carlos Williams’ Sour Grapes” by Adas Viliusus (2018)

The article challenges the long-standing notion of Williams as a kind of objectivist in his early nature poems. The article explores the fundamental tensions in Williams’s nature poems: his faith in the concrete material world as sufficient to provide insight without the intrusion of a poet and his intricate system for using the objects he found in nature as metaphors, most notably metaphors for salvation, durability, survival, and, of course, beauty. Although the article focuses mostly on the spring poems in the Sour Grapes collection, the argument suggests that Williams was craftier than suspected and created poems in which he consciously and deliberately gifted objects in nature with abstract qualities that he, in turn, telegraphed to his reader.

“Re-Thinking William Carlos Williams’ Objectivity through the Poetic Epistemology of Sour Grapes” by Christopher T. Oakley (2015)

The article explores the implications of Williams’s hard-edged objectivity in his early nature poems, particularly those in this collection. The formulation seems simple: The eye trains on some image in nature. The poem thus emerges from that relationship between the eye of the poet and the thing it takes in—nothing else, no expectation that the thing will mean something or that the poet has a thematic agenda to convey. The upcycling of traditional description, allowing the thing to direct and shape its meaning to the participatory reader rather than the poet belaboring the thing into purpose, gives Williams’s early poetry its radical edge.

Listen to the Poem

“Approach of Winter” is read by YouTuber Chestnut + Hazel

Finding a reading of “Approach of Winter” on its own is difficult. The poem is most often read as part of a collection of his winter poems, most gathered from Sour Grapes. The exception is a 24-second video—the reader is identified only as Chestnut + Hazel (he has recorded an extensive catalogue of readings as well of brief poems, many Williams’s works as well as Psalms from the Old Testament). Curiously, the picture offered as backdrop to the reading is a painting of a sterling tea set with an arrangement of flowers—obviously, nothing to do with the poem’s subject save how it suggests Williams’s own long fascination with painting. The reading carefully abides by Williams’s end punctuation and lingers just enough over the long o’s and long a’s to give the poem a sonic feel.