Heavy Woman
Heavy Woman - meaning Summary
Maternal Tableau, Waiting
The poem presents a congregation of women rendered both stately and heavy, combining classical beauty with maternal weight. They sit in quiet devotion, linked to domestic tasks and archetypal figures, as if enacting an ancient ritual of waiting. Religious and seasonal imagery—Mary-blue, thorn trees, winter’s axle—frames their patient anticipation of a new heart or millennium. The tone holds a calm, uncanny stillness that mixes reverence, inertia, and muted expectation.
Read Complete AnalysesIrrefutable, beautifully smug As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell Shawled in blond hair and the salt Scrim of a sea breeze, the women Settle in their belling dresses. Over each weighty stomach a face Floats calm as a moon or a cloud. Smiling to themselves, they meditate Devoutly as the Dutch bulb Forming its twenty petals. The dark still nurses its secret. On the green hill, under the thorn trees, They listen for the millennium, The knock of the small, new heart. Pink-buttoned infants attend them. Looping wool, doing nothing in particular, They step among the archetypes. Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue While far off, the axle of winter Grinds round, bearing down the straw, The star, the wise grey men.
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