Approach of Winter

Williams could have lined the poem’s bare garden with any familiar decorative flowers; junipers, lilies, marigolds, lavender, and zinnias are all common and very familiar ornamental flowers that can be used to edge gardens in Williams’s native Northeast. The poem uses salvias and carmine instead, which are not just ornamental flowers for Williams (although they are that) but exotic words, words that interrupt a poem that is otherwise sustained by a roughly middle-school vocabulary level. The choice to use such exotic words reflects a deliberate assault on the poem itself.

The words stir the reader awake in a poem that, up until that point, had lulled the reader into acquiescence through the word usage. Much as the daring spikes of color in both flowers spike into color the bleak landscape of the trees and leaves, the words stir the poem into a new direction. Here is sudden energy, here is unexpected novelty, here is a suggestion in language what the defiant flowers themselves suggest in Williams’s fallscape: radical animation, an assertion against expectation, a guerilla action that establishes that exhaustion is not the last word—live, the poem suggests using words themselves. Live, the words tell us, in expectation of surprise. Indeed, not lost on a wordsmith as cunning and intricate as Williams, the word salvia comes from the Greek word that means “healthy,” and carmine comes from the same word that is a dark shade of pure red, suggesting nothing less than life-blood itself. In the end, the poem finds in words themselves an argument against nature’s apparent surrender to the approach of winter.