“Lament of a Man for His Son” appeared in American Indian Love Lyrics and Other Verse (The Macmillan Company, 1925). In her introduction to the collection, Mary Austin, an early nature writer of the American Southwest, wrote, “[T]here will also appear intimate relations between the repetitive pattern of formal elements, the range and interdependence of dance movements, and of decorative patterns of beadwork and textiles. It would, in fact, be very little trouble to accompany each poem in this collection with an appropriate design either of gesture or decorative elements, drawn from the life of that tribe, in which the distribution of formative elements would make a pattern recognizably that of the poem. As for example, in the Paiute Lament of a Man for His Son, the gesture of the first movement would be that inevitable to a man standing at the head of his son’s corpse, and striving beyond his grief to descry his son’s spirit walking the spirit road; the gesture of the second movement, the reverent, slightly swaying tread of friends bearing the body on their shoulders over uneven ground; and of the last movement, the final tearing wrench of human affection.”