Spring and All

From a strictly biographical standpoint, the “contagious hospital” (Line 1) that provides the backdrop for the poet’s late winter epiphany is presumably Passaic General Hospital, where Dr. Bill Williams was on staff. In recounting a moment on his own commute to work on an otherwise ordinary morning symbolically suggests Williams’s faith in those moments when the world we so easily take for granted can suddenly, unexpectedly shimmer into meaning. After all, the speaker is actually a pediatrician and the hospital is actually his workplace. Imagine, the poem reminds us, how the world can so suddenly reveal itself.

More generally, however, the hospital as backdrop gives the poem symbolically its urgent sense of hope, specifically the promise of recovery. A hospital, after all, is not a morgue, nor is it a cemetery. Those patients in the hospital are recovering, their every moment a promise snatched from the reality of death. For now, the hospital gifts the poem with its optimism. Nature is on the mend. Winter is a condition that will pass. As a doctor, Williams undoubtedly walked the corridors of Passaic General seeing not dying but recovering patients, every room, every bed, speaking to the promise of returning vitality and the recovery of health.