I hope the term "poetesses" won’t need defending. It’s true that this noun has generally been dropped in English in favour of "female poet" (the gender indicator still present, but on its best contemporary behaviour). "Poetess" does not have to be interpreted as a term of ridicule: why should the suffix be demeaning, unless you already construct femininity as second class? It seems to me an aptly elegant and defiant word choice. This parable necessarily evokes a culture hostile to women, not a context in which superficial attempts at equality have been made. The women’s hard-won dignity and seriousness refresh the word for us.
The full stop before the qualifying clause, "With books in hand", at the end of this opening stanza, introduces an interesting feature of the syntax. Such mini sentences, split off from a longer "parent", have an appropriately vivid brevity. The technique suggests an oral narrator’s pause for dramatic or comic effect. Throughout the poem, the lineation is designed to give each phrase or word its necessary space and weight.
Analysis in terms of political message hardly does the poem justice. We know the argument already. The point is that, as a story, it’s new: it’s not a revised fairytale, a feminist version of some ancient legend with a heroine instead of a hero. The three women are not aggrandised, and the man seems as powerless, in his way, as they are. Most unusually, the women are poets – and so it’s emphasised that, as such, they should be in charge of their own script. But they’re not. The poem’s message, or, rather, messages, are simple but the outlines may still, in the current political snowstorm, too easily be lost.
