Elderly Care in William Carlos Williams' Last Words Sam Alexander College

Far from the elegiac or lamenting tone the reader may approach a poem with the premise of death implied in the “last words” of the title, Williams delivers an uncompromising picture of the mental and physiological effects of aging. The extent of these highlight some of the moral dilemmas that occur in elderly care, also demonstrating how it impacts family members by imposing difficult or impossible choices on them. This includes the conflict between a responsibility to minimize suffering but also a primal compulsion to keep vulnerable family members alive.

Williams opens the first stanza with imagery of squalor (“there were some dirty plates” l.1) that indicates a low quality of life. The Grandmother is given a distinct lack of dignity, with olfactory language of a “rank” (l.4) smell and a “glass of milk” (l.2) which has likely gone off given its surroundings. As well as these instances of decay mirroring her own aging process in which she is experiencing physical deterioration at the end of her life span, they also contribute to an underlying sense of stasis in the opening sections. The objects exist in an untouched state, with the accumulation of “dirty plates” and “disheveled bed” (l.4) indicating that this has been the case...