Sickness

Williams's unadorned style doesn't allow for a whole lot of fancy wordplay or complex symbols. This poem does hit us up with some intense imagery, however. Sure, Williams's style may seem simple on the surface, but he uses that casual-feeling language to hurl a cluster of words at us that conjure images of sickness.

• Lines 1-4: In the first stanza, the poem paints a vivid picture of the grandmother's sick room by using words that hit up several of our senses. We can see the "dirty plates" and can almost taste this suspicious "glass of milk." We can smell how "rank" this bed must be and can feel the texture of the "disheveled" sheets that probably haven't been changed in a while. Overall, this sense imagery comes together to create a grim picture of the grandmother's room. All our senses are telling us that this is a place of sickness and neglect. 
• Lines 5-6: We get more sense imagery in the second stanza when the speaker tells us, "Wrinkled and nearly blind/ she lay and snored." From this, we can see very clearly how age has shriveled the old lady. The sound of snoring doesn't automatically equal sickness, but it definitely gives us the feeling that this lady is out for the count. 
• Lines 12-15: It's not as evocative as the earlier imagery in the poem, but repetition of the word "hospital" across these two stanzas definitely has an effect. The word is repeated twice, which emphasizes the image of those big sterile buildings that scare so many people like the grandmother so badly. 
• Lines 21-23: In this stanza, we get the words "ambulance men" and "stretcher." If anything conjures the image of sickness, these words do. Worse, it gives us the uneasy feeling that something bad is going down, and it's going down now. These visual images signal a state of emergency.