William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘To awaken an old lady’
William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘To awaken an old lady’ is a poem about an old woman having the realization or awakening of her old age. The speaker of the poem is supposedly the aging old woman describing her own experience of the old age, or could be a person who watches the old woman as she realizes how inescapable death is. The poem is a description of old age by mentioning bare trees, cheeping birds, dark wind, harsh weed stalks, a snow glaze, and broken seed husk. The tone that is expressed in the poem is sorrowful. It is evidenced by the use of such words as dark, bare, and broken. These words express the sadness that the old woman is feeling because of the road that she cannot avoid, a path that slowly leads to death.
The author describes how old age is like the flight of chirping birds that are vibrant and energetic despite the harsh surrounding. He uses metaphors and imagery to convey the message. For instance, the title ‘To waken an Old Lady’ is a ‘flight of cheeping birds.’ The message here is of happiness, the happiness that comes with the summers and also the nature of small cheeping birds. The next metaphor is ‘bare trees above a snow glaze’ that conveys the message of death. It describes that just as bare trees are near the cold snow, old people are near death too. Another metaphor is in ‘buffeted by a dark wind.’ It shows how old age encounters health complications just as the dark wind buffets the birds. ‘on harsh weed stalks the flock has rested’ is a metaphor that portrays the message of how old people feel uneasy when resting. ‘To Waken an Old Lady’ is like ‘broken seed husks.’ This metarphor shows the deterioration of the body that results from old age, just as seed husk does when approaching old age. Another metaphor is ‘and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty.’ The information passed from this is how old people meet problems. The old people are tempered with issues caused by old age.
To achieve rhythm in the poem, the writer employed a fascinating device called a run-on line. This method is where the message’s expression extends to the next line. For example, lines 1 to 6 are different, but the message that is communicated is interconnected. The author, in some instances, uses approximate rhyme; for example, lines 4 and 7 have the words ‘skimming and failing.’ He creates a structure that gives thoughts that are removed from the real. It is making the poem as if reflective of something that is of the past. The rhythm, however, is interrupted inline ten, acting as a shift from the description of old age to resignation to death. There is a grammatical pause in line 9; therefore, emphasizing the question in the next line, ‘But what?’ The distinct break before the question demonstrates a stop in the speaker’s thoughts reflecting on the nature of the ‘dark wind.’
The format that the author used makes the poem easy to read and understand despite the occasional interruption in his lines of thought. The message in the poem is a dark expression, but the language used is beautiful. Words like ‘piping of plenty’ and buffeted by a dark wind’ may be negative but have been correctly applied to create a smooth rhythm to the poem