Answer to Question 1
- Lines 1618 especially seem to contain a metaphor of newborn infants. The adjectives mottled, dried, sluggish could occur in a physicians report. In lines 913 also, the description of bushes, trees, and vines seems painstakingly exact in its detail.
Recalling his life as writer and physician in an article for a popular magazine, Williams once told how poems would come to him while driving on his daily rounds. When the phrasing of a passage suddenly hits me, knowing how quickly such things are lost, I find myself at the side of the road frantically searching in my medical bag for a prescription blank (Seventy Years Deep,
Holiday Nov. 1954: 78). By the road to the contagious hospital was one such poem, originally recorded on prescription blanks (Roy Miki, Driving and Writing,
William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1983 113).
Scholars have speculated that the brief lines of many of Williamss poems may have been decreed by the narrow width of a prescription blank, but we dont buy that guess. Had he wanted longer lines Williams would have turned the blanks sideways or composed in smaller handwriting.
Answer to Question 2Spring is stealing over the land as a contagious disease infects a victim. But spring is not a disease: it has a stark dignity.
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