A Blue Woman With Sticking Out Breasts Hanging - Analysis

A street-scene that keeps turning sexual

This poem watches an ordinary alley at twilight and keeps discovering, almost against its will, how charged the ordinary is. The opening image looks like a plain snapshot: a blue woman hanging clothes On the line. But the speaker’s gaze immediately drifts toward the body—sticking out breasts—and then into talk about sex and moral instruction. The central claim the poem seems to make is that public life can’t be cleaned of desire: even the clean laundry, the children, the moon, and scheduled streetlights all get pulled into an erotic, mocking, half-tender atmosphere that the speaker both enjoys and disowns.

That push-pull gives the poem its restless tone. It’s lewd, gossipy, and quick to joke, yet it also slips into a kind of hushed lyricism (the mmmoon that begins to,drool) as if the city’s grime and beauty are inseparable.

Clean clothes in a dirty wind

Cummings builds the alley’s contradiction right into the weather: A dirty wind that twitches clothes which are clean. The phrase feels like the poem’s moral weather report. Cleanliness exists, but it can’t stop being handled, shaken, made a little ridiculous by what surrounds it. The laundry—usually a symbol of domestic order—becomes a kind of public display, like underwear turned into flags. Even the woman is defined by a mismatch between social role and physical presence: she’s not so old yet somehow the mother of twelve undershirts, an oddly comic way to count a life through laundry rather than children.

The poem’s setting, twilight in a hot alley, matters because it’s an in-between hour. Things aren’t fully visible, but they’re also not hidden. That half-light is the perfect climate for a speaker who can’t decide whether he’s observing, desiring, judging, or just talking.

Mock morality and the urge to sneer

Early on, the poem swerves into reported authority: we are told that marriage is a sure cure for masturbation, and someone named Bishop Taylor is invoked with a nasty pun about who needs hanging. The joke is coarse, but it’s also defensive. By dragging in an official voice and then mocking it, the speaker can talk about sex while pretending to merely repeat what others say. That’s one of the poem’s key tensions: desire is present everywhere, yet the speaker keeps trying to manage it through sarcasm, gossip, and secondhand quotes.

Notice how the poem treats the woman’s body and the moral claim in the same breathy, run-on flow. It’s as if the speaker can’t separate looking from moral commentary; both become forms of handling her. The line between critique of prudishness and participation in objectification stays deliberately unstable.

Puppy and skipping children: innocence inside the heat

Right after the moral jab, the poem briefly opens into a gentler street music: a little puppy hopping between skipping children. It’s a quick glimpse of play, but it doesn’t purify the scene; it sits inside it. Even this is called the consummation of day—the word consummation tilts the innocent image toward adulthood, as if the poem can’t say hour without hinting at sex.

The parentheses, with their half-ceremonial description of twilight—the hour—sound like someone trying to elevate the moment, to make it poetic. But the poem immediately undercuts that elevation with blunt speech and name-calling. The mood keeps oscillating: a lyric impulse rises, then gets heckled back down to the alley.

The hinge: when she talks back

The poem’s most important turn is the moment the watched woman becomes a speaking presence: she says to me you big fool. Suddenly the gaze isn’t one-way. Whatever leering or speculation the speaker has been doing, she answers it directly, and the poem becomes an exchange—messy, repetitive, almost stammered: she says i says and i says Sally. The repetition makes it feel like a real encounter rather than a polished story: two people talking over each other, half-flirting, half-scolding.

Calling him a big fool can be read as affectionate or contemptuous, and the poem refuses to settle it. That ambiguity is crucial. The speaker wants to turn her into an image (blue body, breasts, laundry), but her voice forces him into social reality—names, tones, relationship. The poem doesn’t let the speaker remain safely in commentary; he is implicated, addressed.

Moon-drool lyricism, then the blunt return of the city

After the talk, the poem slips into a sudden, strange sweetness: the mmmoon begins to,drool softly. The elongated spelling and the word drool are childlike and bodily at once—tender, silly, and slightly disgusting. It’s the same mix as the alley itself: heat, moisture, intimacy, and lack of decorum. The moon doesn’t shine; it drools, as if even the sky participates in the poem’s refusal of clean, upright beauty.

Then the poem jolts again with a troubling line: a voice described through a racist epithet is said to feel curiously cool. This is not an incidental detail; it exposes the speaker’s mind as a tangle of sensations and prejudices. The word choice makes the voice into a physical relief in the heat, but it does so by dehumanizing the person speaking. The poem’s urban “realism” here includes the ugliness of casual racism, and that ugliness sits beside the poem’s moments of lyric awe without being resolved.

The final snap—suddenly-Lights go!on,by schedule—lands like a verdict from the city itself. After bodies, laundry, puppies, voices, and moon-drool, the streetlights arrive impersonally, right on time. The schedule doesn’t erase the messiness; it merely frames it, showing how the city contains desire and disorder inside routines that keep functioning.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

When the speaker mocks the idea that marriage cures private desire, is he rejecting moral policing—or looking for permission to keep turning people into spectacle? The poem gives us the woman’s rebuke, you big fool, as if to suggest the real correction isn’t religious advice but being spoken back to by the person you’re reducing to an image.

What the alley finally reveals

By the end, the poem has made a whole world out of low, close things: undershirts, wind, puppies, a name—Sally—and streetlights. Its strongest tension is between the desire to aestheticize this world (twilight as consummation, moon as a soft presence) and the urge to rough it up with jokes, insults, and crude social facts. The speaker lives in that tension: half poet, half heckler, capable of noticing the soft drool of the moon and also of saying what should not be said. The alley is not redeemed, and the speaker is not purified. Instead, the poem insists—by keeping everything in the same breath—that the human scene is made of mixed materials, and that the lights will come on whether or not anyone has learned to see cleanly.