To Waken An Old Lady

William Carlos Williams makes no secret of his thematic focus on aging in “To Waken an Old Lady.” The text introduces its concern implicitly in the title, but immediately tips its hand in its first line: “Old age is” (Line 1). While age is never explicitly mentioned again in the poem, the first line clearly communicates that the image which follows serves as a definition of old age. Because the entire poem is devoted to the image which follows the first line, the text as a whole is devoted in no uncertain terms to old age, aging, and mortality.

The most obvious link in the poem’s reigning image to aging is the season of winter. The poem’s “bare trees” (Line 5), “snow glaze” (Line 6), “snow[…] / covered with[…] /seedhusks” (Lines 13-15) and even “dark wind” (Line 9) are all indicators of a cold, barren winter landscape. To think or talk of life in terms of its seasons is a not uncommon idiom (with roots in Biblical language from Solomon’s Ecclesiastes). Winter, of course, is the season archetypally associated with old age and with approaching mortality. Following the relationship of the natural world to the seasons, life grows in spring, flourishes in summer, matures in autumn, and struggles through its last legs toward death in winter.

Williams’s poem seems to use this common comparison between winter and the last years of life in conventional ways, emphasizing the season’s barrenness and “harsh” (Line 11) “dark wind” (Line 9). The flock of birds lives in this winter in spite of the difficulties, though they are always both “Gaining and failing” (Line 7) against the trials they face. The poem’s final turn does addend this common understanding of the winter season of life with the promise “of plenty,” however (Line 18). According to the poem, old age is the time where one is as vulnerable as a flock of “small / cheeping birds” (Lines 2-3) in winter. However, this apparent vulnerability conceals the joy and vitality of the bounty which one can still find among the hardships. The trials themselves, as represented metaphorically by the “dark wind” (Line 9), are “tempered” (Line 16) by the exultation of finding bounty: the “piping of plenty” (Line 18).

Despite its optimistic turn, the poem does not clarify what it is that the metaphor’s feast of “seed[s]” represents (Line 15). The destitute nature of the winter landscape also finds no definitive clarification in the text, but it is easy to connect it to looming death, illness, a failing body, and a narrowing of options in social fields that accompany aging. The “plenty” (Line 18) of the flock’s feast could refer to wisdom, satisfaction, new friends, family, or any number of benefits of old age—though Williams stolidly refuses to clarify. This ambiguity keeps the poem open to any number of interpretations and allows Williams to communicate optimism about aging that fits every reader’s specific circumstances or assumptions. While this strategy perhaps lacks intellectual argumentative depth, it does create a more easily adaptable and communicable emotional essence.