The Widow's Lament in Springtime Death Quotes

That "Widow" in the title put us on high alert when it comes to death. We're looking for it just about everywhere in the poem. And lucky for us, it can be found just about everywhere, just subtly – like in these lines. Even though this grass is new, and growing well, it is described as a flame. Flames are, to put it frankly, deadly. In this poem, even growth and renewal are described in lethal terms.

These lines sound like a death to Shmoop. Even though our speaker is describing the outside world and the nature in her yard, her word choice is suspiciously morbid. When something closes, that's an end, right? We say "at close of day" and it means at the end of the day. Well, we can't read this line without the faint feeling that it's also describing the end of a life. A cold fire that closes around our speaker? It's enough to send shivers down our spines.

This is a lot like the lines about the new life in spring. What we mean is, while on the surface she's talking about the time when her husband was alive, what it really seems to be telling us about is his death and her life without him now. Our speaker doesn't want to explicitly go there, but when she throws out a mention of her life with her husband and then goes on talking about her yard and her sorrow, it's not too difficult to connect the dots.

You know that white light at the end of the tunnel? Maybe it's a plum tree, shining in the sun. At least for this speaker, it sure seems to be. Plus, there are all those other deathly associations we have with white. First, there are the images of the dead that we have: bones and ghosts, the moon over the white tombstones in a graveyard. Then we might also make a connection with brides (wearing white), which, in the case of this poem, would make us think of her husband and then, yep, his death.

This is the moment in the poem when the depth of our speaker's sorrow is made most clear. Because of a death, her world has been changed (permanently, it seems) for the worse. And now she desires relief through – you guessed it – her own death. As we've mentioned before, the way she imagines this – falling into the flowers and sinking into the marsh – also has a way of making her imagined death seem like a reconnection with the natural world.