“Poem III” in Wallace Steven’s Spring and All depicts the farmer in the rain, walking through his empty fields and thinking about the upcoming harvest.
(Citations with solitary numbers in the parentheses represent line numbers in the poem. Quotations with Spring and All in the citation are from the prose)
In the prose Williams sets up a battle between traditionalists and what he calls “the new order,” meaning the innovative Modernists (Spring and All 15). The farmer’s fields are “blank” and bare (4). Blank could be an allusion to blank verse as a part of tradition which Williams finds so regressive.
The symbol of life, water, exists in the unplanted field because of the rain. Water then becomes a metaphor for the imagination and despite its presence in the field, in between harvests, it is utilized only by “the brown weeds” (8). These weeds, trying to gain nourishment from tradition, or the soil in which they have sprung up, fail in that they lack the farmer, the being who through the imagination and tradition can grow his crops anew. They may even be drowned and browned by the water as they rely too heavily upon tradition rather than imagination.
The farmer is compared to the artist and said to be “composing” in his field (18). The poem ends by relabeling the farmer as an “antagonist” (19). If the farmer is the antagonist then who is the protagonist? Does he antagonize the weeds and the “brushwood[‘s] bristling” (14-15) that, unwelcome, attempt to occupy his field? This seems sensible. Then the weeds and brushwood must be the “Traditionalists of Plagiarism” who try and take over the field (Spring and All 15). Williams claims that these traditionalists attempt to control “the mob” by exclaiming “the solidarity of life” (Spring and All 15). In this sense, the mob is the weeds (that’s a weird phrase grammatically). Wouldn’t weeds strive to be in the same field as the farmer’s chosen crops?
I like your reading of the poem; I think it’s one of the tricker ones in SAL. In one sense, I associate the farmer, like you, with the poet figure. Here, the farmer/poet is on the verge of spring, thinking towards harvest rather than keeping close to his “dull roots” as Eliot does. I like the imaginative projection of the harvest onto the blank fields, which I agree seems to be a metaphor for poetic composition. I’m not sure what to make of “antagonist.” What is begin antagonized here? Is this a figure as spring / farmer / poet as the antagonist of winter of brown weeds?