"My English Grandmother" Still Lives: Tone, Perspective, and Emotional Progression Anonymous College

William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” departs from traditional elegies in many ways. The composition does not follow elegiac meter or structure, though normally a poem with elegiac meter should consist of four iambs and have elegiac couplets. (For its part, the elegiac couplet should consist of dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter.) This poem only consists of lines with three iambs, and has four line quatrain stanzas. The Academy of American Poetry states that an elegy is traditionally “written in the response to the death of a person or group” (Poetic Form). Instead, in Williams’s poem, a sassy grandmother argues with the speaker about how she is being treated at the end of her life. Offering a sharp contrast to a normal elegy, no one is dead yet in this poem. This is one of the biggest differences between Williams’s elegy and others. This poem also departs from familiar conventions of elegy in tone, perspective, and emotional progression.

Williams’s tone is different from the tone used in other elegies, since traditional elegies are lamentations. According again to the Academy of American Poetry, a lamentation is “a poem or song expression of grief” (Poetic Form). An...