Comment on the section beginning "No that is not it" and ending "can make / perfect" in Spring and All by William Carlos Williams.

In talking about the beginnings of spring, William Carlos Williams sometimes addresses the wind, using the poetic device called apostrophe. In the passage preceding the one to which your question refers, it is the wind that he addresses: “Black wind, I have poured my heart out / to you until I am sick of it.” This leads into his contemplating poetry and death:
....There isan approach with difficulty fromthe dead—the winter casing of griefHow easy to slipinto the old mode, how hard tocling firmly to the advance—
There is a clear break between the sections, however. After musing on this ease of holding on to winter compared to anticipating spring—and by extension, the contrast between grief and hope—he changes course: “No that is not it.”
The passage you are considering is a sound poem emphasizing negativity and the “I” of the narrator. “No,” “not,” “nothing” repeatedly negates all the narrator’s action: “Nothing I have done.” The passage also explores the phonetics of “I”—“the diphthong ae”—and the grammatical construction of the clause “Nothing I have done,” turning it into “everything I have done.”
“Everything and nothing are synonymous” when moral, physical, and religious codes are decontextualized, “in vacuuo.” Because of the relentless confusion arising from actions and their multiple interpretations according to those codes, doing nothing is the only thing that could cure that confusion: “only to have done nothing can make perfect.”
With the short lines, sometimes only one word, and the heavy emphasis on language analysis as well as philosophical contemplation, we can imagine a person grappling with conflicting inner forces. The equation of everything with nothing, and the last line implying that nothingness is perfection, suggest nihilism.
The next passages, however, move specifically toward the work of creativity and the role of the artist in life. While the passage you are considering seems rather desperate, the poet has deliberately placed it between the direct contemplation of moving past grief and winter into hope and spring, and the lengthy ruminations on creativity. This placement suggests that it contains hope to balance that despair.
https://archive.org/stream/spring_and_all/spring_and_all_djvu.txt