In her first collection, Bogan epitomized the faults of her sex in “Women” (1923), a stiff, pinched accusation devoid of sympathy. Composed in five quatrains rhyming abcb, the work belies the speaker, who advises her sex to suppress the feminine passions that bind them to diminished expectations. Sharp jabs strike out in nine lines beginning with “they” and a verb, each characterizing some flaw or fault. As though dissociating herself from membership in womanhood, she belittles women for circumscribing their lives and for reining in curiosity and emotion. Through misjudgment and limited horizons, they invest too much of self in “every whisper that speaks to them.” Parallel to a lack of “wilderness” in the opening line, in the conclusion she disparages the self-defeat of far-ranging altruism and counsels women to “let . . . go by.”
In 1941, Bogan published “Evening in the Sanitarium,” which contained a more flowing line and generous compassion than she employed in “Women.” The title introduces an elegy on desolation, the sunset of hope for institutionalized women. Dour and dispirited, the gentle voice quells belief that inmates can achieve a complete cure. Against their “half-healed hearts” batter insuperable odds—a return to childbirth, rejection, and the monotony of middle-class domesticity, which she characterizes as “[meeting] forever Jim home on the 5:35.”
Bogan blames society for killing off the asylum’s survivors. At the climax, she notes with an alliterative double beat, “There is life left.” Pasted-on smiles, suicide, and habitual drinking compromise full recovery. Of her own burden, she speaks of “the obscene nightmare” of wretched childhoods. The poem closes on the seemingly endless corridor that leads to perpetual aquatherapy as Mrs. C and Miss R return to the unresolved conflicts that imprison them.
A change in Bogan’s outlook is evident in “The Roman Fountain” (1968). In imagistic style, it blooms at the time of her December/June affair with Theodore Roethke. Written in an overlong pseudo-sonnet, its joyous lyricism, mirroring a baroque piazza centerpiece, takes shape around assonance (man-made/Shaping), consonance (flaw/fall), and an arrhythmic rhyme scheme of aabcddbbefgefgf. With light-edged trimeter lines, she exults in the beauty of water gushing from black bronze that lifts “clear gouts of water in air.” Breaking at the end of the second stanza in the style of a fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet, she introduces deductions about sculpture with “O,” an emotional embrace of the human touch and an acknowledgment of her own works of imagination.
From this same period, “The Dragonfly,” commissioned by the Corning Glass Company, links to “Roman Fountain” by a concluding reference to summer. Unlike her more compact verse, the poem builds on the nothingness of insect wings and their seeming halt in midair. Composed in second person, the praise poem balances the harshness of “grappling love” and “beyond calculation or capture” with delight in iridescent colors and a weightlessness that seems to defy gravity. The buoyancy stalls in line 18 and outlines an unsentimental glimpse of mutability, the demise of the insect among the other seasonal “husks.”
“Night” (1968), unlike the heavier sound patterns of “The Dragonfly,” shimmers with s’s and repeated breathy w sounds. Encompassed in a single sentence, the four-stanza verse gradually diminishes from six lines per stanza to five, then four as it affirms the timeless grandeur of nature. Set in the balance of life forms that inhabit the mating of salt water with fresh water, the estuary becomes the coastal pulse point, forever renewing itself with a steady, reassuring beat. The abrupt contrast of tidal rhythm with human circulation emerges from a direct address to the reader. Beginning with “O” as she did in “The Roman Fountain,” Bogan pulls back from the shoreline to “narrowing dark hours,” when the spirit is too obsessed with dwindling mortality to take comfort in communion with nature.
