ENGL347 Women Writers
tense verbs of ‘ havebeen ’ ( HK , ll . 7 , 14 , 21 ) that conclude each stanza suggest , the death of Sexton ’ s individual witch does not hinder the process of connection through female experience , which is perpetual and unending .
Thus far , in Coleridge and Sexton ’ s poems , we have seen witches being accorded voices by women poets to express a shared female existence . What has not been considered however , is the intersectionality that exists within this expression . Audre Lorde ’ s ‘ A Woman Speaks ’ articulates a version of womanhood connected to magic and witchcraft that is emphatically ‘ not white ’. However , this is not specified until the end of the poem , making the woman of colour a representative speaker . This expands upon Coleridge and Sexton ’ s collective female speakers by including race as part of Lorde ’ s poetic characterisation . In discussing how witchcraft is incorporated into this , the second stanza of ‘ A Woman Speaks ’ holds particular significance , but other individual lines also act as useful , if more implicit , signposts towards this . The opening of the first stanza introduces the notion of fantasy grounded in creative reality , as the speaker tells us ‘ Moon marked and touched by sun / my magic is
39 unwritten ’ ( AWS , ll . 1-2 ). The gothic black air of Sexton ’ s poem has been extended here to an image of eclipse , connected to magic through the alliteration of ‘ moon marked ’ ( Ibid ). This image is not simply a witchy one however , as being eclipsed in its literal sense underlines a struggle for significance that the female speaker is expressing . Through authorial means , Lorde is revolting against this obscuration in using the magic of voice and her poetry to write what has remained unwritten . As with the declarative title , it is clear that voice is a magical source of power for the female speaker , used to its full advantage through the sustained free verse of the poem . The openness of this form allows the imagery of the sky that is presented at the start of the stanza to broaden out at its end , with the speaker directly addressing the reader in saying ‘ if you would know me / look into the entrails of Uranus / where the restless oceans pound .’ ( AWS , ll . 13-15 ). Here , the internal world of the speaker contains a planetary space that in turn holds within itself pluralised oceans , suggesting a layering of a transcendent self that is constant ‘ restless ’ ( Ibid ) movement . This is similar to the deconstructions of female self that we have observed with Coleridge ’ s dual speakers and the multiple states of Sexton ’ s witch , all of which operate beyond