Meg Day’s “When They Took Her Breasts, She Dreamt of Icarus” is a poem describing the aftermath of a mastectomy, in which Icarus entertains our speaker as she recovers with all the grace of the titular figure plummetting into the ocean. Though complicated by enjambment and slants, the rhyme scheme is a clear indicator of the form the poem takes: it’s made up of sonnets.
The first stanza takes on the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet, the classic ABABCDCDEFEFGG, while the second takes on the ABBACDDCEFFEGG of Italian sonnets. The third stanza, again in Italian rhyme, complicates matters, as instead of ten to twelve syllables per line, it is made up of at least fourteen syllables per line. (Because of this syllabic variation, I want to tread lightly in calling it a sonnet, but poetry frequently takes on more complicated forms than high school teachers were ever willing to admit, so a sonnet it is.) This length lends emphasis to this final stanza, as Icarus and the speaker discuss their thoughts on their inevitable deaths.
The content of the poem is somewhat narrative, with the speaker describing the process of undergoing and recovering from surgeries, giving us such details as her punctured lungs and cauterized cuts. The poem begins with her near death and ends with her reflection on what she wants her death to be; unlike Icarus, whose story most audiences find themselves intimately familiar with, the poem’s speaker is yet undecided, which is apparently how she wants it.
O, how I’d come to crave the surprise of death instead of its prediction:
let me be amazed by my departure, let it be some unafflicted eviction
This is one of the only moments in the poem in which the speaker is an active participant. The work is so much about the things that happen to her. These two lines are a rare instance of her agency, which she uses to bring her story to its end.