Poetry Friday: An Atticus Pick

Atticus chose this week's poem:


Spring and All 
 by William Carlos Williams

 
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
...
But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

(Read the whole poem here, at Poets.org.) 

If you're just waking up, and you're on your first cup of coffee, and you live in Nebraska and it's been a miserably wet, muddy, cold spring-and-all kind of week, you might read it and say, "Huh ... lovely," because there is life and the hint of warmth at the end of the poem, and you're still thinking about that cute thing Ramona said last night: "In Ramona Land, it's always seventy degrees."

But, then, of course the "contagious hospital" will nag at you as something quite unlovely and the word "waste" will linger as you pour your second cup of coffee and then you'll think, "That is so Atticusian of him to choose a Williams poem in which Williams is picking a fight with Eliot."

And it's so Momian of me that I don't want to think about fights this morning.

And so Wife-ian that I love Atticus and his poetry choices.

The round up today is at Jama Rattigan's always delightful Alphabet Soup.