Returning to the theme of freedom, the poet starts off the third stanza with a line about journeys and how women "wait" when they should embark. The line vaguely invokes Homer's Odyssey in which faithful wife Penelope waits twenty years for her husband to return home from his journeys after the Trojan War. Moreover, the poet builds up to a central nihilistic vision when she claims that women "use against themselves that benevolence / to which no man is a friend." No matter what a woman like Penelope does, her kindness is a product of constrictive social roles like marriage. Women restricted to conventional social roles must be "content...to eat dusty bread" while feeding their husbands the cream of the crops. Women neglect themselves in their subservience to men, suggests the narrator. When "They cannot think of so many crops to a field," they overlook their own need for physical gratification. Here, the words "crops" and "field" refer to three layers. First, crops in the field are literally cultivated vegetables and are in stark opposition to the wilderness the poet refers to in the first line -- and thesis statement -- of the poem. Second, crops denote hairs on the "field" of the pubic mound. A woman who does not give thought to crops to a field denigrates her sexual desires. Third, crops to a field symbolize children: the yields of seeds planted in the womb of the earth.

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A love that is "eager" is desperate and clinging. To cling to that which is empty and lifeless is a "meaningless" endeavor. The contradiction inherent in the phrase "eager meaninglessness" refers to the conflicting social roles and identities a female possesses. She is either "too tense, or too lax," according to the narrator. The narrator, moreover, is gender-neutral and an outside observer who refers to women in the third person plural throughout the poem.
The anxiety and tension contained in Bogan's lines culminates in the fifth and final stanza. Women are so on edge as to "hear in every whisper that speaks to them / a shout and a cry." The image is like that of a person easily startled from being tightly wound. Therefore, perceiving a shout as a whisper reflects the "too tense, or too lax" line of the previous stanza and in general conveys the idea that women are caught between two conflicting and contradictory identities. Stuck between longing for freedom and being content with complacency, women have let life pass them by. When indeed they take action by carrying life "over their door-sills" as in welcoming the penis into the "tight hot cell of their hearts," they have no choice but to go numb.