Shyla Vhelle d.M.

Nilo

ENGL3323

ABE IV-2
The Secretary Chant
Analysis
The Secretary Chant (1973) was written by Marge Piercy, an American poet, novelist
and social activist. Her works always focuses on feminist or social concerns, only the setting
varies and her poetry is highly personal free verse.
This paper focuses on the structure and features of the poem and not its meaning. The
poem is composed of three stanzas. It is also composed of many literary devices such as
metaphors, personification, paradox, imagery, and alliteration. These literary devices were
most likely used to compare a woman into inanimate objects for daily usage and
consummation like a machine. For example her hips were compared into a desk in the first
stanza or her head is a switchboard in the second stanza. Readers can see a lot of this image
in the whole poem. It has no meter since it is a free verse.
After reading it for many times you will notice seven sound devices used in this
poem. The hips and clips put an internal rhyme in the line My hips are a desk, From my ears
hang chains of paper clips. From the first stanza to the last stanza you can see consonance
in the following words: ears, bands, breasts, casters, lines, fingers, eyes and reams. In the
second stanza there is the repetition of the word head. We can also see single rhyming in
the line Press my fingers and in my eyes appears credit and debit. There is also end
rhyming like ink-click and crackle-tinkle. From the first stanza to the second stanza we can
notice some onomatopoeia, the buzz-click-crackle-zing-tinkle. Then in the last stanza there is
alliteration of w in the line File me under W because I wonce was a woman. Because of
these sound devices located in this poem we can conclude that Piercy deliberately made it
that way so as to make the poem sound chanty.
Moreover notice also that in the last line of her poem, whether she intended it or not,
Piercy spelled once as wonce whatever reason she has for doing so. At first reading a
reader might find the poem for a machine use in offices but a better understanding on the
devices used will show that this poem is actually made to describe a womans body from top
to bottom. This kind of describing in poem is called blazon in Renaissance poetry.