"The Widow's Lament in Springtime"

1)

In another spring poem, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," in which the confrontation with the awakening
life is extremely painful because it throws the woman back on her own deprivation, this confrontation
culminates in the experience of the overwhelming whiteness of the blossoming trees. . .

A white that rouses the desire to merge with it and get lost in it is experienced as an extreme: Oppositions fuse,
ecstasy leads to oblivion and annihilation, the color of joy turns - as in China - into the color of mourning. In
Williams's poems, writes James E. Breslin, "'[c]rowds are white,' the sea is dark: immersion in either gives
relief, a union with One, but halts the cyclic process of renewal." Kandinsky in turn writes: "White is a symbol
of a world from which all colors as material attributes have disappeared. The world is too far above us for its
structure to touch our souls. There comes a great silence which materially represented is like a cold,
indestructible wall going on into the infinite. White, therefore, acts upon our psyche as a great, absolute silence,
like the pauses in music that temporarily break the melody.... White has the appeal of nothingness that is before
birth"

Peter Halter. From The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos
Williams. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press

2)

The persona in this poem is not the poet but the widow whose soliloquy reflects clearly her state of mind
through simple vocabulary and somewhat irrational transitions. The paradox of flaming "cold fire" foreshadows
the conflict between bright colors and her life's drabness; the enclosure of the same cold fire foreshadows the
conclusion, in which she is smothered both physically and emotionally by whiteness. The widow tries to speak
in short restrained sentences but her emotion breaks through three times--once in the initial metaphor, then more
forcefully midway through the poem, and finally in the last sentence, where the two and's imply another surge
of feeling.

The simplicity of the vocabulary also adds poignancy; it reveals the woman as distraught and inarticulate. One
does not question the genuineness of the stark "Thirtyfive years/ I lived with my husband." The contrast of
"formerly" and "before" with "this year" and "today," the last used three times in the short poem, stresses the
immediacy of the widow's loss.

Structurally the poem is much more complex than "Le Medecin." Williams worked here with two kinds of
statement--emotional and descriptive--the juxtaposition of the two serving almost as figurative expression.
Beyond the first metaphor, personal narrative precedes factual description, the two sections culminating in the
flowers-grief figure. Then the pattern is repeated, leading to the climax in which the sacramental white flowers
are correlated with the ultimate of sorrow, the death wish. This use of section as a kind of metaphor, which I
have termed "transitional metaphor" for ease of reference, occurs often in later poems. The alert reader assumes
that the poet has a reason for this positioning, and so relates the two sections.

From The Poems of William Carlos Williams: A Critical Study. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan
UP, 1964. Copyright 1964 by Linda Welshimer Wagner.

3)

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)

4)

“The Window’s Lament In springtime” is a poem that written by William Carlos Williams. It is about a
woman who lives in a deep sadness because she lost her husband. The poet is a contrived poet who
could mix the beauty of the nature with sadness in human life. The nature plays a great role of
inspiration for the poet. The poet tried to connect the grief that the woman feels with the beauty of
nature. However he narrated a sad story but he chose the best season in whole year which is spring.
The woman compared this season in the last year with the same season this year. Her look towards the
two springs changed. In the first spring, her husband was a live and the elements of nature gave
different sense in contrast this year. The season of spring is different from the others. It means the
warmth so the life goes easily. The trees become green and carry different colors of
fruit. The diseases become less. In fact, the spring is the season of rebirth. The poet gave the nature
different meanings. However it suppose to reverse meanings like happiness, hope and positive
reactions but he made it to give meanings like grief, sorrow, frustration, pessimism, emptiness and
lineless that the woman faced. Although the beautiful colors are a cure for grief sometime but the
sadness in her heart was stronger than this sweet colors as she mentioned.