The opening lines of "Spring and All" introduce the poem’s setting: a cold, barren road, full of mud and “dried weeds,” under a blue sky streaked and spotted with clouds. This is the road to the "contagious hospital," a place for people with dangerous diseases.
Readers may find this opening odd for a number of reasons. First, few would expect a poem that celebrates the spring to start with imagery of mud, withered plants, and cold air: spring poems traditionally get more excited about bounding lambs and sunshine. It’s even stranger for a spring poem to begin with the image of a “contagious hospital,” a place of death, disease, and decay.
But early spring does not involve a glorious and sudden transformation, according to the poem. At least on the surface, this spring looks a lot like the gloomy winter which precedes it. The poem implies that there is no sharp line dividing the seasons; rather, one flows continuously into the next. Here, the natural rebirth of spring is not a sudden force that overwhelms or displaces winter. Instead, it grows out gradually and organically from winter's chill.
The same is true, this poem will suggest, of those qualities that winter and spring traditionally symbolize: death and rebirth, despair and hope. Hope doesn't always come bursting suddenly into dark times, the speaker observes, but grows little by little, almost invisibly.
The poem has no regular meter and is written in free verse—a shape that develops as organically as the little plants that the speaker will admire later in the poem. And its frequent enjambments create subtle moments of suspense. Take a look at how that works here:
[...] the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with [...]
These continuous, developing lines give the impression of a landscape gradually being revealed—and of spring slowly creeping in. Enjambments like these will continue all through the poem, heightening the reader’s anticipation as they wait to find out how spring is to emerge from such a dead landscape.