It is a cliche: Spring brings hope. Even the most morose individual would be hard pressed not to affirm the magnificent resilience of nature in the boom days of spring with its gaudy spectacle of blossoms and leaf. Optimism in spring, however, is cheap and easy. Williams offers a more difficult premise: optimism in winter, a faith in the resilience of nature, faith despite rather than because of the evidence.

In those moments when nature appears dead, the speaker argues, it is only dormant, awaiting patiently the surging return of life. The poem celebrates faith in that resilience of nature. By positioning the speaker in a bleak late-winter wasteland world of dried and broken weeds, slushy brown puddles, and stark, bare bushes and trees, the poem makes all that more emphatic the faith in nature’s resilience. Its vitality, the speaker feels, surges in the very ground, life energy gripping that dead world by the roots and promising an imminent awakening.

Too much a doctor, Williams offers a tempered optimism by refusing to concede nature to death. A little sluggish perhaps, a bit dazed certainly, but nature will not accept the premise of its own exhaustion. The poem takes place just before the razzle-dazzle magic of spring begins to clarify itself.