In his poem "The Widow's Lament in Summer," William Carlos Williams explores themes of mortality, fleeting beauty of life and emotional attachment through the perspective of a recently widowed woman. Through limited descriptive techniques and inverted associations and metaphors, Williams presents an ironic and highly emotional depiction of life after the death of a loved one. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Throughout the poem, Williams notably restricts the form of the poem in order to emphasize a sense of loss or grief. Lines, for example, are never more than seven words long and regularly include enjambment, limited hyphenation, and a lack of punctuation beyond commas and periods. By limiting the length of the lines, Williams creates a compact space of emotion and memory with little digression from the central image, presenting a scene in an almost imagist style. The simple punctuation, enjambment, and infrequent use of hyphenation create the feeling that the reader is seeing the widow's direct thoughts, almost in a stream-of-consciousness type style. By providing the reader with the widow's direct thoughts and emotions, Williams heightens the personal impact of the language by giving it an almost confessional tone, uninterrupted by pause or editing. Through form, Williams creates a poem that allows the reader to see into the thoughts of a totally distressed individual, reinforcing realism by avoiding unnecessary digressions and intrusions. Williams creates images in the poem that are often ironic and, in doing so, subverts the reader's expectations. The widow's sorrow, for example, is caused by the flowering of her garden in spring, a time usually associated with rebirth and joy. The opening image, for example, of "Grief is my own yard / where the new grass / flames as it had blazed / often before" presents the contrasting images of sorrow and the rebirth of the grass that is so naturally powerful that she is described as arriving. in “flames”. The intensity of nature, however, changed its meaning for the widow after the death of her husband. Flaming grass may have once meant passion and happiness, but now it creates “a cold fire / that closes around it this year.” This “cold fire” does not mean that the intensity of nature surrounding the widow has disappeared, it has simply taken on a new meaning, getting rid of the happiness it once symbolized and instead becomes a signal of sorrow and loneliness. Despite this new association however, the widow still maintains a connection with nature, still forming a bond between her and her husband. The white flowers of the plum tree in her garden, for example, create in her a feeling of sorrow due to the fact that she directly associates them with her husband and therefore cannot fully enjoy them as she once did. “Today [she will] notice them / and turn away from oblivion” shows how she is now incapable of seeing them in a completely pleasant light. The white flowers coming from outside her garden, however, create a different feeling for the widow. While in her garden she rejects the flowers, those of "the edge of the heavy woods / in the distance" are welcomed with jubilation, even to the point that she feels the need to "fall into these flowers". By placing these flowers "on the edge of the heavy woods," Williams gives the impression that she is moving away from the tamed and cultivated world she created with her husband and venturing into the unknown, perhaps the life after death. That,.