Miss Gee

Auden, W.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack
  • Date of entry: Sep-26-1996

Summary

Miss Gee wants to be a good girl and keep "her clothes buttoned up to her neck." Time goes by. Finally, she gets on her bicycle and goes to the doctor about "a pain inside me." The doctor diagnoses cancer. Later, over dinner, he comments to his wife that "cancer's a funny thing" that attacks "childless women" and "men when they retire."

Commentary

This 28-line, seven-quatrain poem illustrates the damaging way in which illness can function as a cultural metaphor (see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, annotated in this database). Cancer is a disease of repressed emotion and life-energy. Childless women have suppressed the life-energy, thereby becoming useless and cancer-prone. Similarly, retired men have lost the meaning (i.e. male self-identity as occupation) in their lives and are, therefore, vulnerable to the same fate.

Primary Source

Collected Poems

Publisher

Random House

Place Published

New York

Edition

1968

Editor

Edward Mendelson