Critical Analysis of Preetinicha Barman’s Poem “Cycle”.
By the titular ‘cycle’ Preetinicha Barman in her poem “Cycle” metaphorically refers to the menstrual cycle signifying fertility, birth, flow of life etc which every girl has to undergo enduring all the pain and bane in order to become a ‘woman’. The image of the beads of sweat in the speaker’s body is quintessential of a woman’s menstrual blood— “Pungent, slimy, the quasi-liquid drips” — which flows from the uterus through cervix and out of the body through vagina which is symbolized by the ‘naked hill’, thus implying the spatio-temporal action the backdrop of the poem is supposed to have set against. The use of the adjective ‘naked’ is compatible enough with the vagina in that it sheds or empties all the menstrual blood— which is partly blood and partly tissue from the inside of the uterus symbolized by the ‘red soil’— from it during menstruation. The speaker seems to have been worn out after her ritualistic participation in the monthly period. The burden, pain, sufferings infli...