To waken an old lady by william carlos williams. old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind— but what? on harsh weedstalks the flock has rested, the snow is covered with broken seedhusks and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty.
what clues do these supporting details provide about the poem’s main idea?
life is lonely and difficult for elderly people.
young birds need protection from bad weather.
snowy and windy weather is awful.
elderly people have the ability to overcome the difficulties of old age.

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant