In Hans Ostrom’s “A Woman in Paris,” a woman’s small, orderly life becomes the site of an unexpected visitation. The opening lines place her in “an unambitious café / on one of the smaller avenues,” where she eats her evening meals. She keeps “the objects, events, / and duties of her life orderly.” Into this controlled world comes love, described not as destiny but as a surprise: “by a man’s kindness, crooked smile, / large soft hands.” The poem then tracks the affair’s quiet arrival and quiet end, along with the woman’s response—neither grief nor eager hope, but an almost serene openness.
At its center is the idea that love is like weather: real, affecting, but temporary. The speaker says plainly, “Love like weather / had passed through.” That one simile does most of the poem’s conceptual work. Weather does not explain life, and it does not stay. For this woman, love was “pleasant,” but it “didn’t make life less / immensely mysterious to her.” The word “immensely” matters because it keeps mystery large even while the event itself is small. Love is one more inexplicable thing in a life that remains fundamentally inexplicable.
The poem’s construction mirrors its subject. Seven unrhymed tercets move in short, irregular lines, with enjambment pulling the reader across stanza breaks: “She / kept,” “love; / by,” “weather / had passed through.” The effect is not dramatic, but fluid, as if one thought is always leaning into the next. Rhyme is largely absent, yet the language has quiet internal music: “crooked smile” and “large soft hands,” “orderly” and “love,” “cello music” and “laconic café.” The absence of regular meter gives the final line its weight: “some night, into the laconic café.”
The imagery deliberately undercuts romantic Paris. The café is “unambitious,” the avenue one of the “smaller” ones, not the grand boulevards of postcard. By the end, the café has become “laconic”—a word for using few words—as if the place has absorbed the woman’s undemonstrative temperament. The man is sketched with three human details and then dismissed as “a restless, ill-focused / fellow.” The phrase “incarnation of the love-phenomenon” for another possible love is striking: part theology, part detached observation, it turns love into an abstract event that may or may not return “up the avenue.”
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of both sentimentality and cynicism. The woman neither falls apart when love ends nor hardens against it. She grows “fond of cello music,” a solitary pleasure, and “neither / waited for nor ruled out another” love. That stance—receptive but not dependent—gives the poem its quiet strength. Ostrom leaves her in the café, not alone in a lonely sense but self-contained, ready for whatever weather, or love, happens next.