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The Secretary Chant Figurative Language

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The Secretary Chant Your words aren’t heard nor are your accomplishments. You work long hours day after day only to find yourself in stress, agony, and confusion. You seem to find the only thing given back are harsh criticisms of the work that isn’t your best anymore. A line, one that is crooked into your skin, forms right below your elbow from your heavy arms that are pressed against the edge of the work desk from typing your imprisonment. Mistreatment and judgement from others of a workplace is compiled along with workers’ long work hours and job duties. Marge Piercy, the author of the poem “The Secretary Chant,” once worked as a secretary and a switchboard operator in Chicago. In 1970, during the time that the poem was written, women were given the privilege to work, although the jobs that were made possibly for women to work weren’t in superior positions. Through the depressing poem, “The Secretary Chant,” Piercy uses many meaningful metaphors, imagery, and a major shift to stress the …show more content…

From “My hips are a desk,” (1) the first line of stanza one, to “My navel is a reject button,” (16) the last line of the second stanza, the speaker is shown to be slowly dehumanized as her body parts turn into office supplies. In the first two stanzas, Piercy uses metaphors to describe each of the speaker’s body parts to stress the inhumanity of the speaker. In the third stanza, the last lines of the poem, “File me under W because I wonce was a woman,” (22-25) Piercy no longer uses metaphors to describe the speaker’s body parts but gives a closing statement that the speaker feels she is completely dehumanized and finally gives up on her humanity. The speaker slowly loses her human like qualities along with her non existent personality. The shift in the poem stresses the inhumane “person” that the secretary has

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