by Eric Goudie

Created on: September 21, 2011   Last Updated: September 25, 2011

“Men,” by Maya Angelou is a poem about a young girl’s coming of age and her first sexual experience. It is divided into four stanzas of varying lengths, and runs to just 49 lines.

In the first stanza the female speaker takes us back to her teenage years (and, presumably, into her childhood) as she recalls gazing out the window at the men who pass by on the street outside her home. At first she is simply amazed at their diversity: “Wino men, old men./Young men as sharp as mustard," and then at their sense of purpose: “Men are always/Going somewhere.”

At some point everything changes, and we are informed that now the men have realized they are being watched, and that the speaker’s gaze is surprisingly lusty, for she is “Fifteen/Years old and starving for them.” Even though sex is something she’s never personally experienced she still seems to know enough to favourably compare the men’s “shoulders high” as they look upon her to the “Breasts of a young girl,” implying perhaps some mutual arousal between the watcher and the watched. And she seems to take a very adult pleasure in “Jacket tails slapping over/Those behinds,” – the line break before the next line hinting at a moment of satisfaction.

While the young girl’s understanding of exactly what she is lusting for is incomplete at best (as the next stanza will make clear) the power and the danger of this is simply that she dares to express this sentiment at all. Her lust (perhaps somewhat candidly expressed – few fifteen year old girls would be so frank) isn’t girlish infatuation, or puppy love. It’s visceral, raw, unpretentious. Perhaps even instinctual.

In the second and longest stanza we journey with the girl through her first sexual experience. Unlike many other poems of this nature there’s nothing sentimental, beautiful or even very nostalgic about it. The men (who are always referred to in the plural) start off treating her gently, as if she were “the last raw egg in the world.” But as the sexual act progresses the fantasy disappears, and the lust (which held for a moment, since after all “The/First squeeze is nice”) turns into pain, then into fear.

The moment of male climax triggers in the girl (now, by the crudest of benchmarks, a woman) a moment of realization, followed by a profound anger, then sadness. “Your mind pops, exploding fiercely,

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