Poetry / the girl with the flowers on

My interpretation, which is probably wrong…

A woman, cast out by society, perhaps because of a pregnancy out of wedlock. She sits alone, waiting for the baby to be born, not only for his or her birth, but also for her own rebirth, for a Spring. But instead a Winter storm rages in and either she miscarries or she dies.

It’s very sad. I like the line breaks and especially the mirroring of ‘the couch, the room, the house, the field, the valley.’ It frames that stanza nicely. The language is lovely and descriptive and even the words are sad.

I wonder if a little more punctuation might help. It’s not so important at ‘lightly slightly,’ but the ‘veiled discarded’ took me a while to sort out. I also had a hard time resolving ‘lightly slightly/heavily gone,’ because it seemed so contradictory. Maybe that was the point.

Thank you for allowing me to read.

It’s a highly compelling subject.

I’d lose those ”’neath”’s and use “underneath.” Never be archaic without a good reasong. If there is one for this archaism, it is not so obvious that I grasp it without more reconsideration than I can manage on the basis of the degree to which the poem motivates me to reread it. Maybe for others either a) archaism is not a category of things to be avoided or b) the subject compels them to reread until they see why the archaism is needed or c) it’s obvious to them why it’s needed on a first read through. But for me it doesn’t work.

I also don’t get much out of “a dream to spare.” Is she the dream to spare? Does she have one? What it is it?

I’m new at this reviewing stuff. Hope that minor constructive criticism like this is useful.