Spring and All quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which labels best describe “Spring and All”?

   • Victorian Poetry, Sonnet & Rhymed Verse
   • Romantic Poetry, Ode & Blank Verse
   • Narrative Poetry, Ballad & Folk Verse
   • Correct answer: Poetry, Modernist Poetry & Free Verse
   • Epic Poetry, Heroic Couplets & Satire

   Correct. The poem has no rhyme and no fixed beat, so it is free verse, and it belongs to the modernist poetry of the 1920s, which broke with older forms and looked hard at plain, ordinary things.

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2. 2

   Question 2. Where does the poem take place?

   • In a city park, where the speaker watches gardeners set out new spring flowers
   • Correct answer: Along a road to a hospital for infectious disease, beside muddy, weedy fields
   • Inside a hospital ward, where the speaker sits with his patients through winter
   • On a farm in high summer, where crops stand tall in broad, well-watered fields

   The poem opens “By the road to the contagious hospital” — a hospital for diseases that spread from person to person. Beyond the road lies the “waste of broad, muddy fields / brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen,” with “patches of standing water.” The speaker never goes inside the hospital; the whole poem stays outdoors, looking at the roadside.

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3. 3

   Question 3. What do the lines “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches—” tell us?

   • Spring has already come in full, and the fields are green and blooming
   • Spring will not come this year, because the cold has killed every plant
   • Correct answer: Spring is on its way, though nothing yet looks alive or fully awake
   • Spring came early, but the cold wind drove it back under the ground

   The key word is “appearance.” Spring only looks lifeless; it “approaches” all the same. Williams describes it like someone just waking up — “sluggish” and “dazed.” This is the poem’s turn: after three stanzas of dead weeds and leafless vines, the poem tells us that life is already on its way, even though we cannot see it yet.

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4. 4

   Question 4. The poem never says who “They” are in “They enter the new world naked.” Which reading do the poem’s own words best support?

   • Correct answer: Young plants pushing up through the cold, wet ground of the roadside fields as spring begins
   • Flocks of birds coming back from the south and settling into the bare trees beside the road
   • Farm workers arriving to plow the muddy fields now that the long, cold winter has finally ended
   • The blue, mottled clouds that the cold northeast wind drives across the sky above the empty fields

   The poem leaves “They” unnamed, so any answer is a reading. The strongest one is new plants: the next stanzas name “the grass” and “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf,” and the last lines say “rooted they / grip down.” Birds, workers and clouds do not take root. Many readers also hear human birth in “They enter the new world naked, / cold” — Williams was a doctor who trained in children’s medicine and later headed pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. The poem lets both pictures stand together.

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5. 5

   Question 5. In “uncertain of all / save that they enter,” what does save mean?

   • Rescue from harm or danger
   • Keep or store up for later
   • Because of; owing to
   • Correct answer: Except; apart from

   Here “save” means except. The new arrivals are “uncertain of all / save that they enter” — they know nothing at all except the one fact that they are entering the world. It is an older use of the word, and reading it as rescue or store up makes the line lose its sense.

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6. 6

   Question 6. In “It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf,” what does quickens mean?

   • Grows dim and loses its shape
   • Correct answer: Comes alive and starts to stir
   • Turns cold and hard with frost
   • Falls back into a deep sleep

   To quicken is to come alive or start to stir; in older English, the quick were the living. The word fits the poem’s turn from “Lifeless in appearance” to plants that “begin to awaken.” It also carries a sense of things sharpening: what quickens here is “clarity, outline of leaf.”

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7. 7

   Question 7. Look at “the reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes.” What does holding the word stuff until after a line break do?

   • It makes the line rhyme with the one before it, giving the stanza a songlike beat
   • It hides the bushes, because the speaker cannot see them clearly through the clouds
   • Correct answer: It gives us color and shape first, as an eye would, before we learn what we are seeing
   • It hurries the reader past the bushes, since the speaker finds them dull and ugly

   Williams piles up color and shape words — “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy” — and only then, after the line break, gives us the plain noun “stuff of bushes.” The short lines and breaks slow us down so that we see each thing on its own before we name it. Running a sentence over a line break like this is called enjambment; it is one of Williams’s main tools. The poem has no rhyme at all.

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8. 8

   Question 8. What is happening in “One by one objects are defined— / It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf”?

   • Correct answer: Things come into sharp focus, each taking on its own clear edge as it grows
   • The fog lifts all at once, and the whole landscape turns green in a single day
   • The speaker looks up each plant’s name in a book to learn exactly what it is
   • The wind tears the last dead leaves loose and scatters them along the road

   As the plants grow, each one gets its own shape — “clarity, outline of leaf.” The change happens “One by one,” not all at once. Many readers see Williams’s whole way of writing in these lines: like the Imagist poets he was linked with, he wanted each thing seen clearly and exactly, with a sharp outline.

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9. 9

   Question 9. How does the poem end?

   • With the young plants killed by a late frost as the cold wind returns to the fields
   • With the speaker leaving the hospital, glad that the long winter is finally over
   • With the fields in full summer bloom, green and alive from the road to the trees
   • Correct answer: With the plants rooted firmly in the cold ground, but only just beginning to wake up

   The poem ends: “rooted they / grip down and begin to awaken.” The plants have taken hold, but they are only beginning. There is no period after the last word, and many readers take that as the waking left unfinished: the poem stops in the middle of it rather than closing it off. Just before, Williams names what the moment has: “the stark dignity of / entrance.”

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10. 10

    Question 10. Which statement best sums up a central theme of the poem?

    • Nature is cruel, and nothing that grows can last long against the cold
    • Correct answer: New life starts inside what looks dead, slowly, before we can see it
    • Hospitals are lonely places, and the sick there have no hope of cure
    • Winter is the finest season, and spring only spoils its stark calm

    The poem begins with fields that look dead and ends with plants that “grip down and begin to awaken.” Spring comes “Lifeless in appearance,” and the change arrives “One by one,” not in a sudden burst. The poem asks us to notice renewal at its very start, in the plainest roadside weeds.

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11. 11

    Question 11. Which of these happen or are described in the poem? Mark each one.

    • A cold wind blows over the fields along the road.

      Happened

      Yes. The first stanza has the clouds “driven from the / northeast—a cold wind,” and later the new arrivals feel “the cold, familiar wind.”

    • The speaker goes into the hospital to visit a patient.

      Didn't happen

      No. The hospital is named only in the first line, as the place the road leads to. The poem stays outdoors, looking at the fields and the roadside.

    • The grass appears before the wildcarrot leaf.

      Happened

      Yes. “Now the grass, tomorrow / the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf” — the grass comes first, and the wildcarrot leaf is still to come.

    • Bushes and small trees along the road still have dead, brown leaves under them.

      Happened

      Yes. The third stanza describes the “stuff of bushes and small trees / with dead, brown leaves under them / leafless vines.”

    • The poem ends with flowers in full bloom along the road.

      Didn't happen

      No. The poem ends with plants that have just taken root and only “begin to awaken.” Nothing is in bloom.

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