Lucille Clifton's Poetry

The poet begins as if in the middle of a discussion of her hips and indicates the need for freedom:

Her hips are valued and have importance, and so they do not "fit into little petty places." Rather, they "are free hips," and they celebrate that freedom in the way they move and in the space they occupy as they move. The hips can be seen as a synecdoche, meaning that they are the part that stands in for the whole. In this case, they are the part of the body that represents the poet herself--she is free, she asserts her freedom, and she, like her hips, does not "like to be held back."

The hips of the poet have a sensuality that is emphasized most in the final lines:

The poet's use of her hips as representing freedom also gives the poem a comic tone as the poet talks again and again of her hips, their freedom, their reality, as if they had a mind of their own and an existence apart from her. The

. . .
Having presented all the evidence of age and impending death, the poet notes how the other person's love for him is that much stronger because the lover knows all these faults and loves still. Indeed, the fact that death is nearing means that the lover's love must be all the more real because the lover knows the object of love will soon die. The poet develops the idea of age and in the first 10 lines, and then the whole is linked to love and a specific instance of love in the final couplet. Shakespeare uses repeated sounds within a line to draw words together and to increase the meaning they convey. The repeated "r" sound in the fourth line slows the line down and contributes to the sense of age creeping up on one. That line also uses a shift in meter to make the meaning for forceful to the reader--"Bare ruined choirs" begins with a spondee, a foot with two accents, making the reader slow down and note the juxtaposition of "bare" and "ruined" with the rest of the first four lines, words that show how the tree has been denuded and made less than once it was. A spondee also begins line 8--"Death's second self, that seals up all the rest." A spondee is found in the second foot of line 11--"As the death-bed whereon it must
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
ABABCDCDEFEFGG English, Joy Williams, Lucille Clifton, Mayst Behold, freedom hips, image age, wishes care, Shakespeare's Sonnet, hips hips, celebrate freedom, hips freedom, move space, recall earlier, move hips, freedom poet,
Approximate Word count = 1592
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)