SOURCE: Harris, Victoria. “‘Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning’: Robert Bly and Female Consciousness.” In Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly, edited by Richard Jones and Kate Daniels, pp. 153-68. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Harris explicates Bly's poem “Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning,” emphasizing its “feminine” principles of intuition, empathy, and integration.

Our epoch is filled with the resurrection of the woman. In a variety of disciplines—politics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, literature—apartheid features of patriarchy are giving way to a spirit of inclusiveness, the proper context for the female spirit. In a cohesive gesture, we increasingly mend a world divided by maps, categories, “objectivity,” and a strict adherence to logic. Cohesiveness results from a participation in the collapse of a defined bifurcation between masculine and feminine natures. Authentic synthesis occurs as the woman enters a previously masculine world...