Cassandra
To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 12, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Cassandra” first appeared in the December 1924 issue of The Nation and was later included in Louise Bogan’s collection Dark Summer (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). “Cassandra’s stance as a female prophet dissociated from other women and from other prophets parallels Bogan’s view of herself as a woman poet, alienated from other women and their ‘silly tasks’ as well as from male poets,” writes Mary DeShazer, a professor emeritus of English and gender and sexuality studies at Wake Forest University. In her essay, “My Scourge, My Sister: Louise Bogan’s Muse,” from Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 1985), DeShazer continues, “Like Cassandra, doomed by her own plaintive cry, the poet is isolated by her poetic gift, at once a debilitating and an empowering force. Neither the poet nor Cassandra chooses her gift of isolation, and both are ambivalent toward this power imposed by forces beyond their control.”
Louise Bogan
