The Cold Night - Analysis

Overall impression and tone

The poem registers an immediate sensory chill and moves quickly from detached observation to a sudden, intimate yearning. Its tone shifts from cool, clinical description—“It is cold. The white moon”—to an almost erotic warmth in the speaker’s recollection—“In April I shall see again.” The mood alternates between isolation and desire, creating tension between public distance and private longing.

Contextual note

William Carlos Williams, an American modernist and physician, often wrote brief, image-driven poems that capture everyday moments. The poem’s plain diction and compressed scenes reflect his interest in direct, local detail and the mixing of the ordinary (a sergeant, his children) with personal, bodily response.

Theme: isolation and observation

The opening lines emphasize separation: the cold, the distant moon and “pale shadows” on “frosted grass” set a scene of stillness and loneliness. The image of the Police Sergeant’s wife presented among her “five children” reinforces social distance—the speaker watches her in a domestic role from outside, an observer separated from family warmth.

Theme: desire and memory

Against that isolation the speaker’s bodily voice intrudes—“a new answer out of the depths of my male belly”—and memory or anticipation transforms the moon’s “white” into “thighs.” The shift to April signals seasonal renewal and erotic hope: the speaker expects to see “the round and perfects thighs / of the Police Sergeant's wife” again, suggesting desire anchored in future reunion and the regenerative power of spring.

Symbols and imagery

The moon and the whiteness recur as mutable symbols: first as distant cold light, then transfigured into the intimate image of thighs. This transposition links the celestial and the corporeal, implying that external landscapes (winter, moon, frost) mirror inner states (desire, hunger). The contrast of cold and the warm “male belly” heightens that metamorphosis. The Police Sergeant’s wife functions ambiguously—as a maternal figure surrounded by children and simultaneously as an erotic object—raising questions about propriety, voyeurism, and the complexity of desire.

Final insight

Williams compresses a social snapshot and a private stirring into a few stark images, using seasonal and bodily metaphors to move from stillness to yearning. The poem’s power lies in the abrupt collision between observed reality and internal longing, suggesting that even the most ordinary scenes can be charged with intimate significance.