What William Carlos Williams saw outside the contagious hospital

Another great William Carlos Williams poem is the first poem and the title in his collection Spring and All (which also contains The Red Wheelbarrow); this poem sometimes known by its haunting and scary first line:By the road to the contagious hospital. Typical of Williams, this poem seems to be a simple description of landscape and fields in late winter or early spring - dried weeds, "patches of standing water," "upstanding twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees," and so on - very depressing, the kind of landscape few would pause to describe. But Williams empowers the landscape with the first stirrings of life as "dazed spring approaches" and "one by one objects are defined - it quickens." A few things going on here: first, we know that WCW was a physician, I think primarily a pediatrician and ob-gyn - so there's an obvious echo or reflection in this poem of the experience of watching and tending birth - though he's talking about plants it's obvious he's talking also about the overall experience of birth: "they enter th enew world naked, cold, uncertain..." Also, important to think of this poem in a literary context: WCW announcing in this book in particular a fresh new vision of American letters, clean and clear and full of new life. His celebration of spring is a echo of course of the Canterbury Tales' opening - and also, I suspect (though I'm not sure of the chronologies here) an answer to this antithetic American-born near contemporary, T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland: the dull roots stirred in Spring and All are not cruel, but life-affirming. In Eliot dull roots are stirred; in WCW they "grip down and begin to awaken." Finally, what do we make of the locale: this stirring of life taking place in the barren land that presumably serves to isolate the "contagious hospital" - the pestilence and disease all around, only doctors and medical staff ordinarily cross this boundary (like Charon, crossing the river - isn't that also in The Wasteland?) - but in this instance, the poet finding life and regeneration - through his profession, and through the forces of nature that sometimes cure and heal, but in all instances experience the "profound change" of spring and resurrection from the dead.