Spring (April 1941) by E. B. White: Critical Commentary

The essay Spring (April 1941) does have its narrative and persuasive dimensions. The story of the clinker in the brooder provides some narrative tension in the last half of the essay. And the whole piece tends toward the establishment of a case for certain domestic values in the midst of an international crisis-a world war in fact. But it lacks the tone of persuasion, and if we trace the movement of the essay from beginning to end, we can readily discover its dominant meditative quality.

It does, not have the pace of a story or the structure of an argument. It moves abruptly from one item to the next-from the condition of a hog to a letter about Superman, from Little Women to lambs, from snakes to starlings.

Actually, White prepares us for this process in his opening sentence, which is so casual, so unpremeditated, that it is not even a complete sentence-merely a fragment. What could be more appropriate, though, for someone who is making "Notes on Springtime"? This phrase following these words is the clearest announcement of White's meditative intention: "and on anything else that comes to mind." Yet he restricts himself somewhat by adding the final phrase: "of an intoxicating nature." We may expect, then, that he will confine his meditation within the limits defined by "springtime" and "intoxication." Still, both these themes leave him plenty of room to move around in. Since much of the reader's pleasure in a meditative essay conies from watching the author move around, we will begin our analysis by looking briefly at the opening sections, to see how White is moved by the suggestions-the associative power-of words, images, and ideas. Then we can go to the later sections for a more detailed sense of meditative movement.

The first two entries following White's announcement of his subject seem at first sight to be entirely unrelated. And in a sense they are. Yet, when we look at them in the light of the entire essay, we see that they establish a rhythm that later becomes more insistent: the movement from natural details to reminders of an unnatural world, from the "blithe and bonny and good and gay" to "a representative of Superman. Inc." But what, we might ask, does "superman" have to do with "Spring"? Nothing and everything, for White is continually contrasting his idea of spring with the "Nazi idea of Fruhling" (German for "spring"). When we make this connection, we can reclaim the word that lies behind "Superman" - the German equivalent "Ubermensch," a favorite expression of the Nazis in describing themselves. Thus the Nazi idea of spring would be a new world rules by Supermen. Now we can see why White chooses to note that the "representative" was after all, only an average-sized man (nothing super)."

With these few cues, we can readily see how White gets to his third entry and the movement that takes place within it, from the coziness of the family reading a peaceable novel about more innocent times to the "wrenching experiences." And then back again to "the intoxication of spring" and its effect on the lambs. From then on the going is easy, since the next several entries stay exclusively with the joys of nature in spring.

Now we turn to the long section that begins with the difficulties of "tending a brooder stove," since this will provide us with a basis for more sharply distinguishing the meditative essay through a contrast with Lawrence's directly persuasive piece. Here we notice that White uses farmyard images similar to those used by Lawrence in "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men." But Lawrence uses his farmyard as an analogy to support an argument: it is a generalized farmyard, though concrete in detail. White's chickens are specific, and exist in a direct relation with the meditator himself. They have a kind of historical reality, like the characters in a narrative essay. Yet this episode of the chickens is important simply because it happened to the meditative author of the essay. It is presented with almost no dialogue and little action. Both story and ideas are subordinated to White's ruminations.

Let us consider, for example. White's comments on the relative merits of hens and stoves. Here he lets his mind play whimsically with the comparison. He is not out to prove anything. What, then, is the effect of this paragraph, and how has White achieved it? We can begin to answer those questions by looking at some of his statements on the merits of a hen:

1. "A hen's thermostat is always in perfect order.
2. "A hen ... is draft proof.
3. "She doesn't have to be shaken down."
4. "and red-hot coals never roll out of her on to the dry floor"

This list of the hen's advantages is amusing rather than persuasive, for White has been considering the hen as a kind of stove, with all the equipment that a stove might have. The ideas of shaking down a hen, and having a hen start a fire by laying hot coals, are in themselves ludicrous; they carry none of the persuasive bite of Lawrence's idea of a woman laying an empty ink-bottle. Lawrence's image is sarcastic, satirical and therefore an attempt to persuade. White's images satirize neither hen nor stove; they are amusing feats of the imagination in a playful mood.

Now let's consider these two statements:

1. "A hen has a larger vocabulary than a stove."
2. "A hen is a good provider and does a lot of spade work which the ordinary stove of today is incapable of"

In the first of these, White has placed both, hen and stove on an equal footing as communicating creatures (after all, a stove makes noises, too). He has reduced the difference in kind to a difference in degree. In his benevolent perspective, both stove and chicken are assumed to have, something to say to those who will listen, and with mock judiciousness he awards the hen credit for using more words than the stove. In the second statement he follows a similar procedure but adds more humorous implications: first, that even though the ordinary stove may not be able to scratch up food for chicks ("spade work"), some extraordinary stove might well be able to; and second, that this extraordinary stove may be a real possibility in the future, since only the ordinary stove of today is incapable of such feats. Here, of course, he is also taking pleasure in using that salesman's cliché, "the ordinary stove of today" in such an absurd context. White also gains an effect by understating a dimension that another writer might sentimentalize as mother love. In assessing the advantages of hen-heat as compared with stove-heat, he reminds us that the hen's "warmth has that curious indefinable quality of sociability which I believe means a lot to a chick and keeps its bowels in nice condition." The term "sociability" as a quality of heat is unexpected hot richly appropriate, and the picture of a contented chick as one whose bowels are "in nice condition" is unsentimental but not without charm.

As the essay moves along, the general reflections on fires and chickens become mixed with more intrusions from the outside world. The meditator is clearly supposed to be White himself, and his job of writing conflicts with his job of chick-tending. Also the news of World War II impinges more insistently than earlier upon his personal pursuits. The death and destruction of war now become explicitly poised against the warmth and life of the brooder: "I soon knew that the remaining warmth in this stubborn stove was all I had to pit against the Nazi idea of Fruhling."

The last paragraph of the essay summarizes these ideas and glances back at an earlier paragraph, in which White's "friend" asked that he "spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment." When we focus on this statement we can see this essay as a kind of dialogue, since the whole meditation is a response to the friend's request-especially that final paragraph, in which White asserts that he will continue to publish his little adventures, and that even in a time of international cataclysm it is necessary to pursue "whatever fire delights and sustains you." In this paragraph the egg and the coal finally become symbols of all the things that make life worth living, the things that White feels we must be concerned with in order to remain human. To this point his meditation has led him, and he closes not with an appeal to us but with an assertion in behalf of himself: "I still publish." In this meditation, then, he persuades not us but himself, and we overhear the associative pattern of his meditative process. We see the subject through him, and what we perceive of it is always in relation to him.

(This commentary has been adapted from “Elements of Literature” edited by Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Comley, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael Silverman)