The woman within

Lyric poetry has always explored the individual'srelationship to nature and the universe, but more importantly, the relationship to the self that is writer, reader, thinker, and feeler. The divisions of my thesis represent various stages of this relationship. "In the Shadows" includes poems bom of self-examination and personal reflection. In most cases, their poetic power comes from a turning within. "Awakening" is comprised of poems that are a re-emerging from within, poems of nature sifted through the self and returned in organic form. "Into the Light" characterizes the final stage of poetic development when nature and self interact, and the poems become a reaching out to the reader.

The images of darkness and light, fire and water, correspond to this development to mimic the gradual turning into the light-knowledge and strength of self-that is the carthasis of poetry. These opposing elements are yet necessary: the darkness within brings forth and intensifies the light. And in the fire there is both communion and annihilation, a growing thirst for water.

More specifically, in the final section these images highlight the experience of women in the struggle for a voice, personally, politicaly, and morally. Through sublimation of the self in the act of politicalization, the voice becomes stronger, more sure of itself. In the first two sections the self confronts experience through the personal and that experience enlarges and refines the personal, so that the poetry reflects the process of creation. There is a constant tension between the possible and improbable,the imagined and the real.