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.