Women

By Louise Bogan 1897–1970 Louise Bogan

Women have no wilderness in them,

They are provident instead,

Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts

To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,

They do not hear

Snow water going down under culverts

Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,

They stiffen, when they should bend.

They use against themselves that benevolence

To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field

Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.

Their love is an eager meaninglessness

Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them

A shout and a cry.

As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills

They should let it go by.

Source: Body of this Death: Poems (1923)

Biography

Louise Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. Her subtle, restrained style was partially influenced by writers such as Rilke and Henry James, and partially by the English metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Vaughan, though she distanced herself from her intellectually rigorous, metaphysical contemporaries. Some critics have placed her in a . . .

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