Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
An unnamed woman describing her own body.
Form and Meter
Fifteen lines of irregular length without a set meter or rhyme scheme.
Metaphors and Similes
The speaker metaphorically refers to the magical properties of her hips, describing them as "magic hips" and stating that they can "put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!" The latter description contains simile as well as metaphor, comparing a man's movements to those of a toy.
Alliteration and Assonance
The poem contains a great deal of assonance using short I sounds, echoing the vowel of the word "hips." This appears in sentences like "these hips are big hips" and "they don't fit into little / petty places." The latter line contains alliterative P sounds, while alliteration also appears in the repeated M sounds of the phrases "these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips," as well as in the repeated SP sounds of the lines "to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!"
Irony
This is a pointedly non-ironic poem. The speaker's bluntness, clarity, and confidence are central to the poem, and Clifton therefore avoids irony entirely.
Genre
Lyric poem; ode
Setting
The setting is not explicit, though it is implied to take place in twentieth-century America
Tone
Enthusiastic; Direct; Self-Assured; Joyful
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: the speaker. Antagonist: any forces, especially racism and sexism, that aim to restrict or limit the speaker.
Major Conflict
The poem's major conflict is between the speaker's autonomy and happiness and an outside world that often seeks to weaken or restrain her. However, the speaker is utterly confident in her ability to overcome these harmful forces, and so the poem's conflict remains somewhat in the background, with the poem functioning as a statement of victory and resilience.
Climax
The poem's conflict arrives in its final lines, when the speaker describes her hips seeming to enchant men.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
The statement that the speaker's hips "don't like to be held back" is an understated, almost aggressive assertion of freedom, in contrast to less understated but similar statements like "they do what they want to do."
Allusions
The poem alludes very loosely to the history of American slavery.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The poem as a whole is based on synecdoche, wherein a part of the speaker's body—her hips—stands in for the speaker as a whole.
Personification
The speaker's hips are personified, imbued with agency and personality of their own.
Hyperbole
The metaphor that the speaker's hips can "put a spell on a man" is somewhat hyperbolic, overstating the power of the hips for rhetorical impact.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
