Home > I Knew a Woman Summary & Study Guide

I Knew a Woman (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

The Poem

“I Knew a Woman” (along with fifteen other short lyrics) appeared in a section of Words for the Wind entitled “Love Poems.” This poem was apparently written about the time of Theodore Roethke’s marriage to Beatrice O’Connell (a former student of his), and its speaker is a man very much in love and awed by the beauty of the woman he admires so profoundly. The poem concentrates on the erotic and physical but deals also with larger philosophical issues. Its tone is a subtle mix of the comic and the serious.

The poem’s metrical pattern is...

[The entire page is 1544 words long]

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