All's Swell That Ends Well

     We regret to inform you that the scourge of sexism extends its talons into even the study of poetry. Even into the very terms used to describe it!
     Check out this deeply misogynist verse:

     The female ends her sentences uncertain;
     The male concludes his ev'ry line with force.

     Now let's mark which syllables are stressed:

     The FEmale ENDS her SENtenCES unCERtain;
     The MALE conCLUDES his EV'ry LINE with FORCE.

      The first line finishes with an extra, unaccented syllable, while the second brings down the hammer on an accented one. Therefore, in the minds of the patriarchal white men who wrote most English poetry (and came up with terminology for it), the first line sounds weak, and so it has a "feminine" ending. "Masculine" endings are of course strong and emphatic. Think those pasty old dudes were compensating for something?

We may never know.

      Shakespeare, perhaps the ultimate Dead White Male, liked to play with these categories. When he wrote a sonnet that began "A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted," he gave every line in the poem a "feminine" ending. But! The poem is actually about a man -- probably the well-born gent that the Bard is thought to have secretly adored. And just to continue with the gender-bending, here's a musical setting for the poem by Rufus Wainwright, a proudly gay man with a husband and a daughter.

      

So this lesson has, shall we say, a gender-fluid ending.