Girl Powdering Her Neck

Song is describing a print of a scene where a woman is putting on makeup and grooming herself. The fact that he is looking at a picture is important because it is a moment frozen in time. The poem...

To me, this is a poem about what women have traditionally been compelled to do for men -- how they have been pushed to make themselves into what men want and how this forces them to submerge their...

In this poem, there is a girl who is preparing herself for her day. The last three lines that you are asking about illustrate her looking in the mirror of a pond, as illustrated in these lines:...

Literally speaking, the young woman in the poem is transforming herself into a courtesan, a woman who is, to some degree, selling her body. In the Japan of these times, there were women who were...