The poem being studied comprises two sentences, of which its title comprises a fifth of the whole length. The first sentence describes what the speaker has seen followed by the next sentence which relates to what the speaker has subsequently learned. Lines 1-7 paints a scene of her mother looking at his dead father inside the casket. It is assumed that this happened at the last night of mourning vigil as stated in line 3, “for the last time” , thus the mother expressed her last words devoid from any emotion, "Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you in the morning." Ideally, a wife is expected to deeply mourn for her husband’s loss by sobbing or crying, but she did not. Neither is she happy or angry; talking to her husband for the last time was in a congenial and straightforward tone. This stress is derived from the noted absence of any strong emotion aside from the courtesy that would be extended even to a stranger. Rather than cry over his body, bid her husband goodbye, or tell him how much he was loved, the speaker’s mother does something else entirely. Notably, Walker’s father was actually named Willie Lee, thus the name in the last part of the …show more content…
The term free verse is a catchall phrase for poetry that is not written in any sort of metrical form, which is the mindful arrangement of words according to their stressed and unstressed syllables, often in defined patterns. Other attributes typical to poems written in free verse are that they do not rhyme (or do so in irregular patterns), have erratic line breaks, and are written in colloquial, or everyday, language. All of these characteristics are also found in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ This style, which is actually a calculated lack of style, is typical of the time period in which the poem was written. Free verse was extremely popular with American poets throughout the middle period of the twentieth