Few poems make a demand as plainly as this one. "Look at me," says the title, and the speaker repeats the order, with small variations, through almost every stanza. The signature, "Marcette, Swamp Hag," reads like a persona more than a plain name, though that is an inference and nothing more. What the poem gives us is a voice that has been hurt, hidden and buried, and that now insists on being seen.
The central idea is a reversal of the gaze. At first the speaker is an object of inspection: legs, feet, face. By the end she is the one doing the commanding, and what the watchers are made to see is the evidence of what was done to her. The poem moves from concealment to exposure. In the second stanza the bruises are "Hidden / By hosiery and stiletto," and the concealer is "dripping off," a line break that lets the makeup slide away just as the word does. Femininity here is both costume and armour, and it is failing. Later the same items return damaged: "battered heels," "Torn up stockings," "Ragged dress." The disguise has not simply been removed. It has been worn through.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its short, broken lines sound like speech that keeps catching on its own anger. Sound does some of the work instead. The b's of "beaten bruises" and "battered heels" thud like repeated blows, and "Bloodshot and / Frenzied" hangs the speaker's eyes on a line break so the reader has to stare at them. The phrase "vengeful rage / And righteous fury" pairs two kinds of anger. The second word insists that the first is justified.
The most unsettling effects come from line breaks that split the speaker from herself. "As you spit upon / Me and / My grave" cuts "Me" off from "My grave," as though she were already both a living person and a corpse. The ending is cleverer still. "As I / Rise from the / Grave you made" sounds complete, a simple accusation: you buried me. Then the poem adds, on its own isolated line, "Me," and finally "Dig." The grave was not only made for her. She was forced to dig it herself. A single enjambment turns a ghost story into a statement about coerced complicity, about being made to take part in your own destruction.
The persona matters here. "Swamp hag" is a figure from folklore, an ugly, marginal woman associated with bogs and rot. Rising from the ground, the speaker takes on that role deliberately, claiming the monstrous label instead of fleeing it. The same move appears in the phrase "My feminine wiles— / that are perhaps called / Uranian—". "Wiles" is an old, suspicious word for women's cunning. "Uranian" is a historical term that, as far as I know, was used for people whose desires or gender fell outside the usual categories. The hedging "perhaps," and the dashes that fence the word off, suggest a speaker who knows she is being named by others and is not sure the name fits. Judging by this, the poem links her suffering to how she is classified and judged, though the text never says exactly who "you" is. That vagueness is useful. The accuser could be an individual, a crowd, or a whole society that spits, looks away, and hands over the shovel.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to ask for pity. The speaker does not plead. She gives orders, and her list of damage, from legs to dress, is presented as evidence against the viewer as much as a sign of her own suffering. Rage in the poem is not a loss of control but a form of testimony. The closing image does not offer healing or reconciliation, only a body coming up out of the earth, unhidden, with the watchers forced to keep looking.