"The Bear" and "The Bitch"

Here's one of my favorite Faulkner fragments, from "The Bear," when Isaac returns to the camp:

....he had not stopped, he had only paused, quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and, being myriad, one: and Old Ben too, Old Ben too...

I love the cycles here--just like the dog trailed the bear...
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Another blog I read daily, Chanticleer, has an entry on BITCH poems. I nominated Sexton, and agree with Plath and Gluck, too.

Here's another entry into the pantheon, from Robert Lowell:

"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

The Wife of Bath reborn...