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.