Another Weeping Woman - Analysis

Introduction and tone

The poem addresses a mourner with a direct, admonishing voice that combines pity and urgency. Its tone begins as consoling counsel—"Pour the unhappiness out"—but shifts into darker warning as grief is depicted as poisonous and isolating. By the end the mood becomes bleak and metaphysical: imagination is framed as both refuge and absent comfort, amplifying the speaker's sense of loss.

Relevant context

Wallace Stevens often probes the relation between imagination and reality; his work routinely contrasts inner imaginative life with external absence or indifference. Though this short poem lacks specific biographical markers, it fits Stevens's broader concern with how the mind makes meaning in a world that can be emotionally barren.

Theme: Grief and its corrosive power

The poem treats grief not only as sorrow but as a corrosive substance: the speaker urges the woman to "Pour the unhappiness out" because "Poison grows in this dark." The image of poison and "black blooms" in the "water of tears" makes grief active and spreading, suggesting that unexpressed sorrow becomes self-destructive rather than purifying.

Theme: Imagination as consolation and its failure

Imagination appears as "The magnificent cause of being" and "the one reality / In this imagined world," positioned as the thing that ordinarily sustains life. Yet the poem ends by showing that imagination has abandoned her "With him for whom no phantasy moves," indicating a painful limit: some losses resist imaginative repair and leave the mourner "pierced by a death."

Imagery and symbols

Water and tears symbolize both release and stagnation: tears are a potential cleansing stream but here become a medium for "black blooms," an image that fuses floral beauty with rot. The "magnificent cause of being" as imagination is a central symbol—noble and life-giving, yet paradoxically described as part of an "imagined world," raising the question whether consolation is ultimately illusory. The "him" for whom "no phantasy moves" is left unnamed, intensifying the poem's ambiguity about whether the loss is death, betrayal, or emotional absence.

Conclusion and final insight

The poem compresses a psychological drama: grief must be expelled or it becomes poisonous, but even the saving faculty of imagination can fail in the face of certain absences. Stevens thus presents consolation as precarious—powerful and necessary, yet not always sufficient—leaving the reader to confront the uneasy boundary between imagination's comforts and the hard facts of loss.