Summary

In the first line, the speaker describes her hips as “big,” going on to say that she requires plenty of space to move around in. The fourth and fifth lines state that the speaker’s hips do not “fit into little / petty places.” This is the reason that the speaker has “free hips”: “they don’t like to be held back” (7).

In the eighth line, the speaker declares that her hips have never been enslaved. This allows for them to freely move about and do as they please. In the 11th and 12th lines of the poem, the speaker continues paying homage to her hips by calling them “mighty” and “magic.”

In the final lines of the poem, the speaker proclaims that she has known her hips to exercise their magic on a man. This was done through a spell that caused the man...