Death and God

She points out that while we would want God's will to be all that is good, "God's will is-the bud of the rose for your hair, The ring for your hand and the pearl for your breast" (804), that isn't always what God's will is. Instead God's plan could even be death. "But what if God's will were the famine, the flood? And were God's will the coffin shut down in your face?" (804) .
             However, In Piatt's poem Giving Back the Flower, she writes about a married women who falls in love with another man. "You looked at my hand and you knew that I was the slave of the Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free" (801). In the first stanza of this poem, before you know she is married, but romantically involved with someone else, Piatt's words show that there relationship is doomed. "And to give me a little scarlet bud, that was dying of frost, to wear" (801). While this man is indeed giving her a flower, it is a dying flower. The flower symbolizing their love which is dying because she is married. In the second stanza her find out this other lover has died. "When I saw your corpse in your coffin, I flung back your flower to you; it was all of yours I ever had; you may keep it, and-keep from me" (801). Those last three words, simple as they are, show how much the narrator loved this other man. She knew that his presence and his gifts taunted her when she wanted to remain true to her husband, but in his death admitted that she really loved him. All this bad fortune, she blames on God. "Has God, then, no world to look after, but ours? May He not have been searching for that wild star, with trailing plumage.instead of thinking of you?" (801). She is asking the question we all ask when we think we have been unfairly treated: Why? She just does it more eloquently. She is asking why God isn't pursuing grander things like the stars and planets, but she also asks why he isn't concerned with the starving or the dying.