Night, in this poem, is not a dark force to be feared but a small animal to be won over. Howard Nutt's "Woman, Woman" opens with a woman whose eyelash has "caught the woman-wisdom from the night," and then quickly reverses the usual order of power: night "comes to her as a little thing / to stroke and pet and finger / till it purrs." The central idea is a kind of intimate mastery. Womanhood is imagined as an ancient, inherited knowledge, and that knowledge lets her handle the vastness of darkness the way one handles a cat.
The poem's first move is its strangest, and it is worth lingering on. "Soulseining" is a coined word, and its meaning has to be inferred. "Seining" is fishing with a net, so her lash seems to work like a net for the soul, or perhaps one that drags the night's wisdom up out of the dark. Either way, the eye is an instrument of capture, and the verb "caught" confirms it. Yet the capture is gentle. By the second stanza the caught thing has become a pet, and the progression "stroke and pet and finger" slows the line down, making us feel the repeated motion of a hand on fur. The word "purrs" arrives alone on its own line, a small payoff, as if the poem itself had been soothed into sound.
From there the poem turns to sleep, and its address shifts. The speaker now says "listen awhile to the persuasive / rhythm of sleep," an imperative that makes the reader a participant, almost a lover. The instruction to "touch each closing lid / (and lips are best for this)" is the poem's most tender moment, and the parenthesis is clever: it is a whispered aside, a bit of practical advice slipped in like a secret. Sleep is not simply imposed on the woman; it is coaxed, kissed into place. The poem's rhythm supports this. Nutt writes in free verse, with no rhyme and lines of uneven length, so that the sentences drift and lengthen the way thoughts do at the edge of sleep. The long, looping sentence of the final stanza, which runs through three lines before reaching its conclusion, mimics the slow slackening of attention.
The imagery then expands outward in a startling way. Night is "folded there with some night out of Egypt." The phrase is deliberately vague, since we are not told what Egyptian night means, but the effect is to stretch the personal moment across history. This one woman's evening is joined to ancient nights, to a deep inheritance of darkness, mystery and ritual. The poem suggests, judging by this image, that the woman-wisdom of the opening is not private but old, passed down through countless earlier women and earlier nights.
The ending turns on its most vivid image: lips that "quite part with an old burden of meaning / to let the star-burs glisten on her teeth." A bur is a clinging, prickly seed-case, so "star-burs" imagines stars as small things that catch and stick, like the seeds that attach themselves to clothing on a walk. Here they cling to her teeth and glisten there, as though the night sky had been taken in and was now shining from within her mouth. Notice the double release in the phrase "old burden of meaning": her lips part, and a weight she has carried is set down. Sleep, then, is also a relief from having to mean anything, from the burden of speech and interpretation.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little: a handful of lines that reimagine night, womanhood and sleep through a single sustained tenderness. It refuses the cliché of darkness as menace and replaces it with something warm, tactile and faintly mythic. Its coinages ("soulseining," "star-burs") ask the reader to work, and the reward is a poem that feels less explained than experienced, much like falling asleep itself.