Phenomenal Woman

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Tone

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Literary Devices Tone

The tone of “Phenomenal Woman” is predominantly confident and prideful, though also defiant. In each of the poem’s four stanzas, the speaker enumerates the various ways in which her attitude and comportment communicate her sense of self-worth and attractiveness. Neither the “pretty women” (line 1) she encounters nor the “fellows” (line 17) who swarm around her fully comprehend the source of her confident mystique. For the speaker, however, the source is obvious. It’s for this reason that she can easily rattle off the specific aspects of her embodiment that make her so striking. As she puts it in the second stanza:

It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.

These lines (lines 22–25) clearly communicate the speaker’s confidence. They also demonstrate the sense of pride she takes in her embodiment of femininity. Yet in addition to her confidence and pride, the speaker also exhibits a spirit of defiance. She does so on a formal level when, for instance, she makes use of highly flexible metrical and rhyme schemes that constantly elude the reader’s expectations. She also exhibits defiance in her repeating claim that she’s a “phenomenal woman.” Implicit in this refrain is a rejection of the societal bias that would see her mode of femininity less desirable and hence inferior.

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