The Widow’s Lament in Springtime (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
The Poem
William Carlos Williams’s “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is a twenty-eight-line, free-verse lyric in which a widow expresses her grief over the death of her husband as she looks at the growing plants and flowers of spring that remind her of her loss. It is a modernist version of a pastoral elegy that uses images of nature to lament the death of a loved one. Unlike earlier elegies such as John Milton’s seventeenth century “Lycidas” or Walt Whitman’s nineteenth century “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” there is not the usual coming to...
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