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What Horror To Awake At Night By Lorine Niedecker

613 Words3 Pages

In the 1920s, women’s rights were different, outdated...old. There were many protests held in support of the rights for women to participate in basic things such as voting. But these basic things were beyond simply voting. This grew into becoming more than just who was in office, but who could be in office. Equality. “What Horror to Awake at Night” is a poem written by Lorine Niedecker. This poem was written in 1940, and while it came after the rights for women to vote in the United States, it could have been a beacon for celebration for women. Something uplifting, progressive...new. Instead Lorine Niedecker had written a beautiful piece by shining a light on her struggle to claim her autonomy, challenging gender norms, and testing societal …show more content…

She does this by using repetition, highlighting the concept of “nothing” and it’s all without purpose, no doubt striking a chord with the reader and inspiring them to escape that same nothingness. The first person speaker of the poem discusses waking up in the night within her household and reflecting on the nothingness in which her life has led thus far. She states: “What horror to awake at night/I’ve spent my life on nothing (Neidecker). This shows her waking up within the nightly hours in the absence of light, reflecting on her life. By starting off in the first stanza evaluating her own life, the reader is immediately sucked into the same scenario in their mind, regardless of what time of day or night this is read. It’s a highly relatable set of lines as many people, if not all, who walk the Earth have run into this exact scenario. There’s a sense of underlying empathy already which captivates us and moves us to reflect on the feeling of autonomy. But what is true autonomy? According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, the word “autonomy” means: the quality or state of being self-governing. With this in mind, we can see the poem beginning to reflect the state of women throughout this time period, which further catapults into the future in our modern-day

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