In "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," William Carlos Williams describes the experience of a woman grieving over the death of her husband, her partner for 35 years. The spring landscape is coming to life, but all she can see in the glory of this reborn world is a mirror of her own sadness. Indeed, since spring carries with it connotations of renewal and procreative regeneration, the arrival of the season seems especially cruel, reminding her of a freshness of life in which she believes she can no longer participate.
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
Based on experience, in place of an embrace of life, the emerging season makes the widow long for death. Such a worldview runs counter to the optimism expressed in a poem like Stevens' "The World This March", in which the speaker hopes that his consciousness will be restored just as spring restores the earth after the ravages of winter. There are gloomy times - and this has been a favorite poem of mine since my teen years - when Williams makes more sense to me. The springtime happiness of the world can seem quite cruel when you're subsumed by feelings of sadness or grief - and, possibly, by the belief that love will never come again. How can you enjoy the renewal of the world when you feel so cut off from it?
Posted by gminter at April 17, 2004 10:25 AM