Xanthippe is a name that has come down to us as an insult. In tradition she is the wife of Socrates, remembered as a nagging, bad-tempered woman, and her name became shorthand for a scold. lemonpastilles builds a poem around a speaker who has been trained to be the opposite, quiet and downcast, and who decides in the end that the insult is better worn than avoided. The central idea is that silence is not neutral. It costs the body something, and breaking it, even clumsily and painfully, is a way of becoming visible.
The poem begins with the body under control. The speaker sits on her hands, sees through "broken glasses" and opens her mouth to find "ashes", so that what she might have said has already burned out. Then she bends the proverb that pressure makes diamonds. "My hands are under pressure, but so are diamonds" sounds like consolation, but the poem keeps complicating it. The royal image is turned the same way: "princesses, whilst looking on the ground, wear their crown." Being a princess here means keeping your head bowed so nothing falls, and the sore neck is what that obedience feels like. The pain escalates, from "hurting" to "burning", while the air gets "colder", so heat and chill pull against each other in her body.
The form seems to follow this tension. Everything is lowercase, even "i", and the lines run to irregular lengths. Rhyme comes and goes, never settling into a pattern: "down" and "crown", "tongue" and "lung", and a slant pairing of "mouth" and "doubt". The most telling pair is "weight" and "straight". "Weight" is repeated, first as something she releases, "my weight", and then as something that drops, "a weight drop in my chest". She has been carrying herself as a burden, and the relief arrives with the rhyme, as her spine straightens along with the line. The short line "i sit up straight" is the poem's physical turning point.
The change of mind is quieter than you might expect. "A xanthippe i must be, i daresay" is a reluctant, almost polite deduction: if speaking makes her a shrew, then so be it. The "switch in my head" suggests a decision made in an instant rather than a long argument. She then redefines the royal image, "a princess i am, but not the one they say", keeping the title and rejecting the instructions that came with it. Even her "last breath" is a sigh that starts something rather than ends it. Speaking is not triumphant, either. Her teeth are "sore from the shutting of my mouth" and her cheeks are swollen, as if the unsaid words have been physically stored there. She replaces "the doubt" with the words on her mind, which is an effort rather than a burst of confidence.
The last section turns outward. Her "trepidation" now faces "a crowd of the unbroken", and the word echoes the "broken glasses" of the opening. Those who see clearly are the ones who haven't been damaged, and they are "the rich, the satisfied". Her promise that "from my pain the rich will no longer catch delight" implies that her suffering has been watched as entertainment. Judging by the imagery, there may be a bitter irony in the diamonds too: the pressure falls on one person, while the sparkle belongs to someone else. Her hands are still "cold" and shiver "like the earth when touched by human", a strange, tender simile that makes her seem both vulnerable and handled, but she speaks anyway.
The ending is deliberately plain: "i am a woman." There is no capital letter, no full stop and no decoration. After all the metaphors of ash, crowns, diamonds and earth, the poem finishes on a flat statement of fact, and the word "woman" takes over the work that "xanthippe" was meant to do as an insult. That is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows how a label is taken back through a bodily change as well as a defiant slogan: hands released, back straightened, mouth open. The poem argues that dignity can begin with something as small as sitting up.