Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's January 22nd, 2020.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is by Louise Bogan, an American poet who lived from 1897 to 1970.

She was a poet laureate in the 1940s, and then also was the poetry editor for the New Yorker for almost 40 years.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Women. It goes like this.

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 dorsils, they should let it go by.

So this poem is five stanzas, four lines each with an A, B, C, B, Rhymsky. It's a really interesting poem, I think, because as

Robert Pinsky put it over at Poetry Foundation, to call it ironic is probably

not a strong enough word. It's an inadequate term, he says. He says, quote, the poems quick

shifting and looping moves and reversals lead me to find irony an inadequate term, especially if one thinks of irony as a binary toggle on or off

rather than a matter of degrees and kinds.

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