Imbalance Between Men and Women Illustrated in Eavan Boland's Poem, It’s a Woman’s World

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In the poem, “It’s a Woman’s World,” Eavan Boland offers a bitterly ironic interpretation of women’s role in society. Despite the passing of thousands of years, she believes that women remain the inferior sex. She supports this idea through simple, short words that convey a sort of self-mocking irony and outrage at the role women are forced into by men. The poem is broken down into fourteen stanzas each containing four lines. There is no structured ryme, rather lines and stanzas flow into each other to form sentences. The words are short and simple, carefully chosen to convey deep sentiments in one or two syllables. For example, Boland writes “And still no page/ scores the low music/ of our outrage” (42-44) None of the words in this stanza are more than two syllables yet the clipped tone expresses her indignation at the way women have been relegated to second class people over the course of history. There are two symbols that appear throughout the poem, stars and fire. Star-gazers and fire-eaters represent great-thinkers and innovators, the people who shaped history by ...

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