Ling-Ling, you forgot your Bling-Bling.

"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" by William Carlos Williams

First, having a name like William Williams is either a sign of uniqueness, cruelty, or a mixture of both in his parents. A major theme of the poem is definitely the poignancy of springtime for the widow. As shown in the previous poem, "Spring," this season is usually a sign of happiness and rebirth, this can even be seen in the musical The Producers in the song "Springtime for Hitler" which recounts in Broadway fashion the joy of Hitler conquering Europe (If unfamiliar with this musical, I suggest introducing yourself.). So with the universality of equating spring and happiness, the poignancy comes when the widow no longer sees the beauty in it due to her great pain of losing her husband. She recounts many times the "masses of flowers" around her yet feeling nothing. Even the "new grass flame[d]" in previous years but now she is consumed by an oxymoronic "cold fire" of longing for her husband. Feeling all this super-duper sadness, though, she does want to leave her yard of sorrow ("Sorrow is my own yard....") to the meadow her son suggests. The son seems to be wanting her to move on ("Go look at those flowers for a while!"), yet the widow wants to "sink into the marsh near them" as a kind of way of dying to be with her long lost hubby.

How could you not like this? It's beautiful!

Most of my time spent on this blog was used thinking of titles for entries.

THEME and POINT OF VIEW


Well to wrap things up, I feel that I was supposed to get a theme about having a greater understanding for society and pitying its lack of morals and how the quality of life is going down the tubes. Most of the time though, I found from the very beginning of the book asking myself, "why do I care?" I really did, it's in my first blog. I feel most of the chapters could be summarized like this:

Begin with a heavily intricate description of the scene,

Jacob eats and drinks enough to feed France and Spain combined,

Everybody takes a stab at getting into Brett's pants,

Jake takes a shower and goes to bed.

At least Hemingway's consistent. I'm sure glad I can count on you!

Oh and since Jake told the story, it was in first person. Probably because Hemingway didn't identify with this heathen generation, but rather felt obligated to fix its woes through heart-pumping fiction.

This is me reading The Sun Also Rises on my computer from 1989.

And I never really figured out what the title meant, but I'm sure we'll discuss it in class.