The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

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 I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

This week’s poem is from the sometimes underrated early work by the American modernist Williams (1883-1963). First published in his 1921 collection, Sour Grapes (which can be read here), The Widow’s Lament in Springtime is already hallmarked by Williams’s strong visual sense and his fine ear for the poetic ebb and flow of informal speech.

In first six lines of the widow’s monologue, the tone is passionate, and close to that of the traditional lament. It’s almost as if the poet spoke for the widow – or that her intensity of feeling made her speak like a poet. “Sorrow is my own yard,” she declares, and the new grass “flames as it has flamed / often before but not / with the cold fire / that closes round me this year”. The figurative emphasis of these lines then recedes, with a segue from “this year” and its particular significance to the more conversational tone of recollection: “thirtyfive years / I lived with my husband”. The diction is lower-key, and its expressiveness derives from a simple, almost flat authenticity in which the understated power of free association and repetition is able to sustain intensity of feeling. “The plumtree is white today / with masses of flowers.”

When the next line begins with the same phrase (“Masses of flowers / load the cherry branches / and color some bushes / yellow and some red”) it’s as if a sigh accompanied the observation, and the diction, simultaneously vague and focused, tells us that there is no elation in the widow’s response. Bright colours are noted, but the movement of the lines as well as the word choice, diminishes the effect, in perfect preparation for the psychological process the widow goes on to acknowledge. Her grief overwhelms the blossoms and the earlier joy they gave her: “… today I notice them / and turn away forgetting.” Omission of the comma after “turn away” suggests the forgetting happens swiftly: it’s almost at one with the seeing. As I read these lines, I remember Williams the physician, and that he must have listened to many patients’ voices recounting bereavement and sadness during that early period when he was still continuing the “day job” alongside his writing.

An important aspect of the poem’s structure, related to the absence of any unnecessary punctuation, is the absence of stanzas, even where there’s a shift of tone or subject. After “forgetting” her joy in the flowers, the widow changes the subject, or seems to change the subject, as she did in the line beginning “Thirtyfive years”: her thought simply flows on. But there’s a distant, telling echo of “today” (“The plumtree is white today”) as the closing section of the monologue begins (or rather continues) “Today my son told me …”

What the son has told the widow is mysterious, and perhaps touches on the mythological. This new pitch is registered in the unexpected description of the woods as “heavy”. Is it the son’s word or the widow’s? It seems there’s a newly visionary significance to the “trees of white flowers” the son has seen – as if they represented memories or ghosts from another time. They may suggest the fields of Asphodel (and, for Williams’s readers, will evoke his wonderful later poem, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.) That the white flowers on the trees represent the peace of death is clear from the widow’s response.

Her additional reference to the marshes (her own vision rather than the son’s) may suggest the presence nearby of the rivers of the Greek underworld, particularly, perhaps, Lethe, the river of “forgetting”. Despite the more conscious “poetry” of these lines, the widow continues to speak in character, simply and unselfconsciously. Her grief is at its most fully focused: “I feel I would like / to go there / and fall into those flowers / and sink into the marsh near them”. The line-break after “like” is perfectly judged, a hesitation we can hear, followed by the longer, decisive, concluding lines in which the two distinct verbs, “fall into” and “sink into”, precisely evoke different kinds of movement, different kinds of release.

• The Widow’s Lament in Springtime is published by Carcanet in Volume One of Williams’s Collected Poems.