"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" #8

When I first read this poem, the tone was one thing that stood out to me from the very beginning. The tone of this poem by Williams is grief, anxiety, and entrapment. This tone is achieved throughout the piece through Williams' diction and repetition. The wife in the poem who is grieving for her husband shows her emotions by using words such as "sorrow" and "cold fire". She implies that she is trapped in her grief and other mixed emotions when she states that the cold fire "closes round me this year". Also, telling how long she had been with her husband (thirty five years) added to the tone because it made the longing for the past that much stronger. Lastly, her desire of "falling into the flowers" and "sinking into the marsh near them" can be linked to death as her only option to get away from her negative emotions. The repetition used in this poem plays a key role in contributing to the tone. The phrase "masses of flowers" is used in the twice right next to each other. This repetition emphasizes the amount of flowers present in the spring. After focusing on this, Williams then compares the widow's grief to the masses of flowers. Her grief is said to be stronger than the number of flowers, which makes the tone of the poem so much more effective. The second word that is repeated in the poem is "today". I think the purpose of this use of repetition is to compare the widow's reactions to and feelings toward spring now and in the past. "Today", the widow has no appreciation for spring. In the past, parts of spring were her "joy formerly". The tone of anxiety and grief in Williams' poem is made clear through both rhetorical strategies of repetition and diction.