Speaker: "The Silence of Women" by Liz Rosenberg

Liz Rosenberg is a renowned poet and children's book author. She is currently an English professor at Binghamton University. She has won many prestigious awards over the years including the Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry and New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age and the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Prize.

The Silence of Women

 

Old men as time goes on, grow softer, sweeter,

while their wives get angrier.

You see them hauling the men across the mall

or pushing them down on chairs,

"Sit there! and don't you move!"

A lifetime of yes has left them

hissing bent as snakes.

It seems even their bones will turn

against them, once the fruitful years are gone.

Something snaps off the houselights,

and the cells go dim;

the chicken hatching back into the egg.

 

Oh lifetime of silence!

words scattered like a sibyl's leaves.

Voice thrown into a baritone storm--

whose shrilling is a soulful wind

blown through an instrument

that cannot beat time

 

but must make music

any way it can.

 

The speaker is the voice of a poem but this figure is not always the poet himself. Most often the speaker of a poem is a character that the poet creates to speak for him indirectly. There are different classifications of poems based on how many speakers there are. Some poems are narrative meaning that they have one or more voices as well as a narrator describing who said what.
In Liz Rosenberg’s poem “The Silence of Women” she uses a narrative voice to paint a picture of gender criticism in society. Rosenberg uses the narrative voice paired with the voice of the stern, tired women to convey her feelings relating to women’s place in society. The poem is used to display the idea that with age women rebel against their role to be silent and become demanding and full of anger and possibly even resentment towards the men who put them in the corner for so long. In the first stanza the poem reads, “A lifetime of yes has left them / hissing bent as snakes” the narrator is portraying for us what years of silence do to women. In the final stanzas the narrator’s diction helps to create the tone that produce’s our speaker’s attitude and helps us to understand the poet’s stance on the issue. The speaker compares the women’s new found voice with music, “shrilling” music. We get the sense that the speaker’s attitude toward the topic is one of anger and sorrow for the women who were so long silenced.