poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

The speaker misses the cherry tree. She misses watching them but now forgets. The speaker is also suicidal.

In William Carlos Williams poem entitled “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” the persona is of a woman that is overwhelmed with grief because of the death of her husband. The meaning that I got from this poem is that death unleashes a horrible feeling in us, and the impact we get from it overshadows the things that usually make us happy.
The poem contrasts spring and all of its beauty, to death and all its heartache. The beauty of spring seems to go unnoticed by the woman. All she can do is think about losing her husband amidst the magnificence of the season.
Williams creates an imagery that is very vivid to us. Spring is a season that brings a lot of joy out. With his descriptions of the colors of flowers, cherry trees, and bushes he is able to paint us a picture of its splendor:
Masses of flowers
Load the cherry branches
And color some bushes
Yellow and some red (11-14)
By setting the poem in the springtime, Williams is able to enhance the poem’s effect. Spring is a time for happiness and rebirth with flowers blooming and warm weather. We usually don’t associate it with death or anything else along those lines. The woman associates springtime with sorrow, but at one time it also brought out delight in her:
But the grief in my heart
stronger than they
For though they were my joy
Formerly, today I notice them
And turned away forgetting. (15-19)

does anyone else truly feel this poem....it's lovely indeed, the repitition of masses of flowers the white and you can just see a pale old woman sitting in a garden watching the trees...sure you can mathmaticize it and say "it's about the interplay of beauty and grief" but look at all you miss....

Indeed a very powerful poem with an incredibly well crafted denoument in the final two lines. Williams seems most effective in the ways he is able to allude to the readers experience of grief, not the widows, who is a mirror for the loss most of us can understand but only fully relate to in shadow.

i understand the poem in general, but i don't get the last part that her son told her he saw the white flowers at the meadows, and she wants to sink near them. Does this mean she wants to die, and follow her husband. Thanks

I think the widow was a young woman .
The spring is lovely and the young widow is also lovely.
But without her husband's appreciation is like the spring without her ,so she.......

i am very sorrowful and feel the narrartors pain in this poem. My husban died and i feel very sad also about it, especially when things are beautiful (in spring). Please take in the beauty of the poem and sorrow for the widows like me.