Point of View

“Spring and All” seems to be from the perspective of an unnamed, omniscient, third-person perspective. After all, the poem does not include any first-person pronouns – “I” or “me” – or any second-person pronouns – “you.” Throughout its body, at around its midpoint in the first line of stanza five, the speaker does mention the third-person plural pronoun “They” (16). Based on that technicality alone, one can make the argument that Williams’s poem is in third person.

In many ways, the poem’s intense focus on personal sensory experience – for example, the opening description of “the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast-a cold wind” – and its attempt to portray the speaker’s eyes moving across the page through the repeated use of em-dashes creates an intimate experience in which the observation of sensory detail becomes almost simultaneously incorporated into the speaker’s mind.

Therefore...