commentary on Men by maya angelou

Men by Maya Angelou is a poem about a young girl coming of age and her first sexual experience. it is a poem that is divided in to three stanzas. It is also run to just49 lines. We are about to break the poem down stanzas by stanzas.  In the first stanza the female speaker took us back to her youth years or childhood. She recalls looking out her window at men that always pass by on the road outside her house. She was amazed at first, the different way these men appear. Older men, young men, wino men. Then she realizes that men are always going somewhere. At this point the point took a shift, where everything change  and we are informed that now the men have realize that they are being watched, and her look is surprisingly lustful, and she is now fifteen years old and she want them. We get to know that sex is something she has never had before.  Now at this point everything get real as she compare the men’s shoulders high and they look upon her to the breasts of a young girl, implying some mutual arousal between the girl watching and the men’s being watched. This is where the speaker get real with us the audience, by taking us through her sexual experience, which is very difficult to do, only few fifteen year old girls will do that. This poem unlike any other poem of this nature there is nothing sentimental, beautiful, or magical about this experience. Started by treating her gently as if she was was “the last raw egg in the world.” But as the sexual act progresses the fantasy disappear. As the male triggers in the speaker a moment of realization, followed by anger, then sadness. She had invested so much hope in men only to find out their need were so far removed from her own. The cravings of the “starving” fifteen year old will never be met, nor even understood, by anyone with such a basic, uncomplicated sexual compass. This realization deadens the woman inside, her libido not gone (for that in itself would now be a welcome release) but permanently, maddeningly locked away, the fifteen year old taunting and teasing the woman with the memories of the idolized desires of her youth. But “No keys exist.” While this would seem to indicate the end of the story (and indeed, many poems in a similar vein do conclude on this melancholy note) Angelou surprises us with an epilogue that turns the “innocence shattered” motif just a little bit askew.