WCW - Spring Storm

The sky has given over its bitterness. Out of the dark change all day long rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground. But water, water from a thousand runnels! It collects swiftly, dappled with black cuts a way for itself through green ice in the gutters. Drop after drop it falls from the withered grass-stems of the overhanging embankment.

 

 

 

This is just a description of a spring thunderstorm, written in language as plain and direct as William Carlos Williams could manage.
William Carlos Williams thought that most poetry up until his time (the 1930's and later) was over-written. He thought that the words had got out of control, poets were just talking - instead of looking at things and telling precisely what they saw.
Williams set out to write a poem of plain description: making his language as ordinary, but also as precise, as a scientist would.
Often William Carlos Williams writes poems of dazzling clarity with his revolutionary technique.
Sometimes - as here - the clarity is there, but it does not dazzle.
It is a description of a storm, in as plain a language as the poet was able to find.