Spring Storm

William Carlos Williams’s “Spring Storm” uses vivid imagery and simple language to describe the natural turning of seasons. Like many of Williams’s poems, “Spring Storm” explores the concept of “no ideas but in things,” and uses specific images to delve deeper into important themes, such as the Revivification of Spring, Cycles of Life, and The Bleakness of Winter. A true Modernist, Williams focuses on describing everyday images to explore universal truths. In “Spring Storm,” specifically, Williams illustrates an occurrence that is already familiar to most people, a spring storm, to comment upon the cycles of life and inevitability of change.

Although the poem seems to be focused solely on concrete images, Williams stresses from the beginning the duality of intent in “Spring Storm.” Despite the poem’s direct use of concrete language, it opens with a line that immediately references an invisible abstraction: “The sky has given over / its bitterness” (Lines 1-2). Because the sky does not literally give “bitterness,” the meaning of the word is abstract and requires reader interpretation; tears and rain drops are often likened and share an underlying symbolic meaning associated with sadness. “Bitterness” that comes from the sky could refer to water from a storm, as if the sky is crying out its own “bitterness” in the form of ever-falling rain: “Out of the dark change / all day long / rain falls and falls / as if it would never end” (Lines 3-6). In opening “Spring Storm” with an abstraction, Williams evokes a certain sense of emotion he wants the reader to relate to and interpret personally. The image of the spring storm, shedding “its bitterness” through rain that “falls and falls / as if it would never end” serves the deeper thematic meanings of the text. Williams sets up a scenario from the very beginning of a world in which falling rain symbolizes “bitterness,” crying, and sadness; put simply, the weeping sky is representative of a dark, grief-stricken emotional state.

Williams adds to the poem’s emotional underpinning by setting the seasonal stage for the spring storm with specific imagery: “Still the snow keeps / its hold on the ground” (Lines 7-8). Midway through the poem, Williams introduces the concept of winter; although the poem’s title references a “spring” rain storm, the natural imagery in the poem is decidedly frigid and marked by signs of a long, icy winter. The addition of the winter element in the poem expands upon the idea of a dark, depressing “season” or the Bleakness of Winter and its connection to the titular spring storm. Although the storm at first seems to be dark, bitter, and never-ending, the rainstorm ultimately heralds the end of winter: “It collects swiftly, / dappled with black / cuts a way for itself / through green ice in the gutters” (Lines 11-14). The water literally cuts through the ice of winter, alluding to the changing of the season and the end of the bleakness of winter. The spring storm goes from being a sign of darkness to a sign of hope, cutting through a dead, empty season. Symbolically, the difficult, emotional “storm” cuts through a season of emptiness, grief, and despair—a season of death—and while the storm itself may be violent and dark, it ultimately will lead to cathartic healing in the form of spring and new life.

“Spring Storm” illustrates, literally and symbolically, the Cycles of Life. Literally, the poem paints an image of nature turning from winter to spring. The presence of gutters implies that the setting is in a city, but the city is touched by the natural cycle of change. The storm, an element of violence, is the turning point between the seasons, implying that change in life sometimes calls for some manner of suffering, self-reflection, and the letting go of personal “bitterness.” The end of the poem looks forward to the spring that will flow forth once the ice and snow of despair melt, giving way to the Revivification of Spring. The closing lines of the poem describe the rain falling: “Drop after drop it falls / from the withered grass-stems / of the overhanging embankment” (Lines 15-17). The rain falls from the grass that has presumably withered during the winter season, and life looks ready to begin anew on the “overhanging embankment.” Although nature is poised at the precipice of new life at the end of “Spring Storm,” the poem retains a sense of stalled movement, almost like a still life photograph, and the promise of an impending change of season—the promise of the “spring storm” is yet to be fulfilled.

The poem’s sixth line sums up the most prominent and memorable theme of Williams’s “Spring Storm”: the rain falls “as if it would never end” (Line 6). While the poem hints at the end of winter and the inevitable end of the rain storm, neither of these things actually end during the scene of the poem. The storm seems to go on forever, “as if it would never end” (Line 6), and the snow and ice of winter “keeps / its hold on the ground” (Lines 7-8). While Williams allows for a subtle hint at hope for the revivification of spring, the poem ultimately denies its reader the chance to experience the change of season—making it clear the speaker (and now the reader as well) feels trapped, overwhelmed emotionally and literally, by a situation or place in time that seems inescapable and unending. Williams’s refusal to follow the wheel of expectation takes “Spring Storm” to its ultimate purpose, and the reader is forced to contemplate what comes next: Will the storm last forever? Will the rain freeze and become only another layer of winter ice? Will the “withered grass-stems / of the overhanging embankment” (Lines 16-17) come back to life again?