Summary
The speaker concludes her rumination on the grief she feels as she watches spring unfold in her backyard. She then describes a tree of white flowers that was mentioned to her by her son. She ends the poem by commenting that she would like to go to these flowers and fall into them, sinking into the waterlogged ground nearby.
Analysis
In the poem's second half the speaker states explicitly what she is unable to find in springtime's radiance: "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." This is the central point of the poem. The speaker's "grief" overpowers any "joy" this scene might have previously evoked in her. While these images "formerly" brought her joy, she now is forced to "turn away" while "forgetting" what she has seen. The renewal of spring was something that brought her great happiness, but it was a happiness she shared with her husband. Now that he is gone, it is too painful for her to remember the joy she felt in those moments, as it only reminds her of his absence. It is a point that Williams makes with his trademark directness, but it is an emotionally complex and honest one. It highlights the strong imprint of memory and the pain of remembering vanished happiness.
The speaker then takes note of a tree her son mentions to her ("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.") before moving into a vision of what she would do if she went to it. She states: "I feel that I would like / to go there / and fall into those flowers / and sink into the marsh near them." She imagines herself collapsing at this tree of flowers and sinking into the marshland surrounding it. It is an image of mixed emotions. On the one hand, it shows her broken, falling and sinking as she cannot continue to endure the weight of her grief. On the other hand, it shows her being able to find some measure of comfort in this "tree of white flowers." She even states that she would "like to go there and fall into those flowers," meaning that she feels there would be some value in this action. Taken as a whole, these final lines seem to imply that now, in the wake of her unbearable grief, the only way she can enjoy these things is to literally "sink" into them. She can no longer simply appreciate them from her window. She must go out and seek some kind of physical communion with these flowers. It is a strange, powerful image that Williams seems to leave slightly mysterious to the reader. Still, given the poem's exploration of shifting meaning, it seems that there is some slight optimism to be drawn from this otherwise tragic moment.
The poem uses nature as a means to explore what absence and grief can do to a person's perception of the world around them. The widowed speaker of the poem is "lamenting" both the death of her husband and the pain that she feels when she remembers the happy times that they shared. The arrival of spring brings her no joy because it simply gives her more reason to think about what she no longer has. The poem shows the way that this idyllic vision of spring carries an altered meaning for the speaker in the wake of her loss.
