Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women” is a deeply visceral and layered exploration of femininity, fertility, sickness, and ritual, steeped in the poet’s characteristic engagement with nature, mythology, and anthropology. The poem does not adhere to conventional praise but instead acknowledges and venerates the cyclical suffering that comes with the female experience, particularly menstruation and its connection to the natural world. Snyder’s free verse style and fluid imagery create an almost incantatory effect, reinforcing the poem’s themes of transformation, embodiment, and sacred power.

The structure of the poem unfolds in two movements. The first section focuses on an enigmatic female figure, a dancer-like presence who exerts an almost elemental influence on the world around her. Her touch is light, deliberate, and intimately connected to nature—holding a leaf that turns in the sunlight, moving with a subtle grace that has an undeniable power over the male figure she engages with. This woman is not simply a passive muse; she catalyzes change. Her actions and presence shape the environment—“Makes him flick like trout through shallows / Builds into ducks and cold marshes.” There is an organic continuity in her influence, a quiet assertion of creation and destruction as intertwined forces. The imagery shifts from the aquatic—trout, marshes—to something more corporeal and consuming: “Sucks out the quiet: bone rushes in.” This moment of intensity suggests a transformation, perhaps an initiation, where the male is “sodded” with roots, pulled into a primal physicality by the woman’s presence.

The movement of her body, the “quick turn of the head: back glancing,” is an assertion of power, a command of perception and desire. She is both seen and seeing, aware of her ability to captivate and shift the male’s consciousness. Yet this power is not framed as a dominance in any traditional sense; rather, it is natural, unforced, an inevitability rooted in her attunement to the cycles of life. She is not separate from the world around her—she is the world, both in its gentle beauty and in its fierce generative energy.

The second section of the poem shifts tone and broadens its scope, incorporating a deeper historical and mythical perspective on female suffering. The lush, fertile imagery of the first section is countered by images of decay and barrenness: “Apples will sour at your sight. / Blossoms fail the bough, / Soil turn bone-white.” Here, the feminine force is rendered in opposition to life-giving abundance; it is a presence that disrupts, that alters landscapes and causes the harvest to falter. This transformation seems to be linked explicitly to menstruation, the “wound” that all women bear. The association of menstrual blood with supernatural power—often feared, often sacred—is woven through the descriptions of women engaged in labor both domestic and wild: berry-picking, working the fields, cracking nuts. These actions, tied to the rhythms of survival, contrast against the deeper knowledge that their bodies carry something ancient, something that makes the land itself react.

Snyder’s global perspective is evident in his invocation of various cultural images of womanhood—whether in a yurt, a modern home, or a marketplace. The universality of female suffering is emphasized: “All women are wounded.” This wound is physical, psychological, and historical. It is carried through generations, evident in the societal restrictions placed upon menstruating women—“Fast it! thick throat shields from evil.” The imperative to “keep out of our kitchen” refers to traditional taboos in which menstruating women are deemed unclean, excluded from communal spaces, yet paradoxically possessing an almost dangerous spiritual energy.

The final lines of the poem descend into a stark and painful image of exile, a menstruating woman crouched in a “bark shack,” blood running down her thighs. The reference to “Mother Eve” being “slung on a shoulder / Lugged off to hell” underscores the theme of feminine suffering as an inherited burden, a cultural and religious legacy that casts the female body as both sacred and sinful. The allusion to “kali/shakti” invokes Hindu mythology, where Kali represents destruction and transformation, while Shakti embodies divine feminine energy and creation. Snyder does not resolve these contradictions but rather embraces them—feminine power is at once generative and terrifying, nurturing and disruptive, something both to be praised and exiled.

The poem’s final movement—locating “hell” in the moon and in its phases—ties this suffering to the broader cosmic order. The moon, often linked to feminine cycles, is the ever-present witness to this ritual of pain and renewal. The imagery of the menstruating woman “crouched from sun” reinforces the isolation imposed on her by tradition, yet there is also a sense of endurance, of an unspoken strength in bearing this cyclical exile.

Snyder’s poem, then, is not simply a lament but a reverent acknowledgment of a fundamental force. The title itself, “Praise for Sick Women,” is both ironic and sincere. The “sickness” is not an illness but a cultural designation, a way of framing and controlling feminine power. By weaving together natural, bodily, and mythological elements, Snyder offers a vision of womanhood that is deeply rooted in the earth’s cycles—one that is wounded but enduring, excluded but omnipresent, feared but revered.

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