In 'Spring and All', William Carlos Williams portrays the contrast between spring and winter, but also life and death. Spring is presented as a symbol of hope, the season when life comes back.
In this stanza, Williams describes the dying landscape. The setting is pretty dark and cold. The plants have become barely recognizable - bushes are twiggy, there are dead, brown leaves under leafless trees. Williams wrote the poem at the end of World War II, when the world was still suffering the consequences of the war. The picture described in this stanza could be interpreted as a metaphor for tragic circumstances at the time the poem was written.
