Edge (1963)

‘The woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of accomplishment,’

End stop - sense of finality and closure

Feminist critique - irony - woman is only perfect when she is dead

Voice - relief, serenity

Enjambment after ‘dead’ and light rhyme - emphasise link between the two, finality of death

‘The illusion of Greek necessity // Flows in the scrolls of her toga,’

Comparing herself to a Greek tragedy (untimely death)

‘Illusion’ - died by choice - ambiguous poetic voice / speaker

Her bare // Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over.’

Personification of feet

‘We’ - first person plural pronoun - speaker and her children

Enjambment after ‘bare’ - naked and vulnerable like the speaker

End stop - cannot go any further

‘Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, / One at each little // Pitcher of milk, now empty.’

Metaphor - children as ‘white serpent[s], ‘now empty’ - she has nothing left to give her children, physically and emotionally unable to meet their needs

Allusion - Antony and Cleopatra - kills herself by poisonous snake biting her breast - children killed her

‘She has folded // Them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden // Stiffens and odors bleed / From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.’

Extended simile - ‘as petals of a rose close’ - maternal protectiveness, winter weather causes flowers to close as a way of survival - natural, beautiful event - always supposed to happen

Alliteration - ‘back’, ‘body’, assonance - ‘bleed’, ‘sweet’, ‘deep’, ‘odors’, ‘throats’ - musicality in voice - serene scene - relief of the mother at death

‘The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. // She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag.’

Anthropomorphism - ‘staring’ - broader, cosmic perspective

Symbolism - the moon as a feminine symbol - understands female suffering

Form

10 non-rhyming couplets, free verse

Freedom and control combined