Throughout ‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime’ by William Carlos Williams the speaker uses an unemotional, flat tone to describe the natural imagery that’s at the heart of this piece. The lines often feel cut short or disjointed. A technique that is accomplished through the use of enjambment. The themes are quite clear. They include mourning/sorrow, life/death, and nature.
The poet takes on the voice of a widowed woman. She describes through symbolic images of flowers and trees the experience of her loss. Her husband has died and now she is left in a world that once held him and does no longer. When she thinks about the things that used to give her pleasure, like the flowers, she turns away. Nothing is the same anymore and any flames that burn within her are “cold” rather than warm with passion. The poem concludes with the speaker alluding to a desire to sink into the earth and join her husband.
‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime’ by William Carlos Williams is a twenty-eight line elegy that is contained within one stanza of text. The poem is written in free verse. This means that there is no standard rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. But, that doesn’t mean the poem is completely devoid of rhyme, rhythm, or other literary devices. This modern twist on a pastoral elegy features a speaker using familiar images of nature to mourn the death of her husband. The widow’s monologue is depressing and without light at the end of the tunnel.
An oxymoron is a short phrase or compound word that uses contradictory words to emphasize a point. For example, “cold fire” in the fifth line of this poem. It plays into the image of the cold “flames” that are growing this year in the widow’s yard. Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. It can be seen throughout this poem. For example, the transition between lines nine and ten as well as that between eleven and twelve.
In the next lines of the ‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,’ the speaker describes a “plumtree” and the various blooms that are blossoming around her. These flowers are blooming just like they used to but they don’t bring her the pleasure that they did in the past.
They are brightly colored “yellow and some red” but her grief is overwhelming any happiness she might’ve taken from them in the past. It is “stronger than they”. This shows the complete transformation that her life has undergone since this loss. She “turn[s] away forgetting” the flowers, which are clearly a symbol of her previous happy state, and enters deeper into her new depression.
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