The poem takes place on one of those late winter mornings when the world, overtired of cold, gray days, seems ready for spring. Nature, however, is not quite ready. Winter lingers. It is another day of work. Williams is presumably driving to work at Passaic General Hospital, now St. Mary’s, where he served as Chief of Pediatrics for more than 40 years. The somber tone is set by the adjective “contagious” (Line 1), which emphasizes the hospital not as a place for healing and recovery but rather for sickness and the spread of sickness. The world, dragging through the last hard weeks of winter, feels ill. Something about winter feels like an affliction, a kind of fever, an enclosing frozen world barren of life, settled into the certainty of its dreary routine.

Spring ultimately begins as a faint stirring. There are no buds, no blossoms, no leaves. The speaker notes “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff” (Lines 9-11), nothing that could be mistaken for spring flowering. At best, spring “approaches” (Line 15) and is “sluggish” (Line 14), as if emerging from a heavy hibernation, as if confused over exactly what the responsibilities of returning to life involve.