The Poetry of Adrienne Rich
“Ideal Landscape” is the first of three poems from the period 1955-1963 in which Rich initially tackles the issue of intimacy. The title’s reference to the relationship as a “landscape” hints at the sense of emotional distance to be found in the poem. Rich speaks of “tak[ing] the world as it was given” and “watching today unfold” rather than being deeply involved in its creation. “The nursemaid sitting passive” is waiting to see if she will be “accosted,” the acted-upon rather than the actor. The poet refers to “rooms of selfhood,” as if identity were a collection of inanimate objects uninvolved with the rest of the world. In stark contrast with mentions of complication and darkness in later poems, “Ideal Landscape” presents “great and sunny squares” with “gilded trees” to illustrate the idealized and unachievable perfect life with the beloved (9).The strict meter and rhyme scheme of “Ideal Landscape,” particularly the use of ending couplets in each stanza, underscore the speaker’s longing for a more controlled, less flawed version of this intimate relationship.
“Living in Sin,” also from 1955, continues the pattern of emotional distance. No interaction between the lovers takes place in the poem; as two objects not directly involved with each other, they are themselves “the furniture of love.” Listing inanimate items in the apartment-“[a] plate of pears,” “a piano with a Persian shawl,” “last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles”-the speaker dispassionately includes the cat, a beetle in the kitchen, and finally the lover himself, referred to only as “he” (9-10). The only references to light are disquieting images: “morning light / so coldly” illuminating “three sepulchral bottles,” and “the daylight coming / like a relentless milkman up the stairs” (10). Internal slant rhyme, alliteration, and assonance provide a subtle structure in counterpoint to Rich’s avoidance of deliberate meter or end rhyme, underscoring the difference between the speaker’s expectations of domestic life with her lover and the mundane details of reality.
“Like This Together,” the third poem in Rich’s early period of examining relationships, was written in 1963. It differs in format from the 1955 poems; there are five stanzas of 12-13 lines, with each stanza numbered, setting up a tension between the visual separation of the stanzas and the title’s promise of togetherness. Rich employs “I” in this poem (in contrast to the “we” of “Ideal Landscape” and the “she” of “Living in Sin”), lending it a more intimate tone than earlier poems. Yet “Like This Together” continues in a similarly distant vein with images of near-intimacy that fail to become truly intimate. Stanza 1 contains the poem’s only semblance of dialogue-a remark that is not spoken aloud because the poet discards it as being more appropriate for “another time.” There is no movement toward true interaction; the lovers “sit parkedâÂ?¦ / âÂ?¦like drugged birds / in a glass case,” physically together but emotionally separate. Short line lengths and frequent stopped lines contribute a curt rhythm that underscores the lovers’ inability to communicate, and the use of slant end rhyme in “geese” / “this” / “case” adds a sense of repetition that suggests a long history of tense silences (34). In Stanza 2, “[r]ooms cut in half / hang like flayed carcasses” (34), reminiscent of the “rooms of selfhood” in “Ideal Landscape” (9). The relationship is represented not by any concrete detail of interaction but by “our two bodies” and “the houses / we met and lived in,” addressing the physicality of houses and bodies rather than the lovers’ hearts and minds (35). Stanza 3 defines the lover’s “certain things in common” only in a physical sense: “a view / from a bathroom window” and “the taste of water.” Rich emphasizes the emotional significance of the stanza’s central lines by drawing the reader’s attention to variations of long and short vowel sounds:
�the way
water tastes from our tap,
which you marvel at, letting
it splash into the glass. (35)
Her description of this pleasure in the taste of water makes clear her fondness for the lover while also suggesting an inability to state that emotion directly. The final stanza comes the closest to true intimacy, as Rich moves from earlier stanzas’ inorganic imagery to the image of hyacinth buds emerging from “hard cerebral lumps” due to “fierce attention” (36).
The second block of poems about intimate relationships occurs in 1967-1976 and includes “Twenty-One Love Poems,” making this period the most significant in Rich’s exploration of human tenderness. The period begins with “Night Watch,” in which the poet feels helpless to protect her lover from life’s difficulties. Rich’s use of a colon in one line allows it to function as both an address to the lover and an attempt to define a condition: “Love: my love is just a breath / blown on the pane and dissolved.” Dark images pervade the poem: “black flint, eyeless,” “pale in sleep,” “black cloud.” Repetition of language emphasizes the feeling of continual helplessness: “What can I do for you? / what can I do for you?” and “while you, / and over and over and always you” (52). Rich’s 1968 poem”Implosions” is a cry of desperate frustration in which the poet implores her lover to “[t]ake the word / of my pulse, loving and ordinary / Send out your signals, hoist / your dark scribbled flags / but take / my hand” (56). The motif of paralysis reappears in the image of the poet’s hands being “frozen to the switch” so that “I cannot throw it” (56) and her fear of having “done nothing” for the lover in the end (57).
“When We Dead Awaken,” written in 1971, transforms images from earlier poems about relationships. Rich begins to integrate the physical and the emotional: “everything outside my skin / speaks of the fault that sends me limping / even the scars of my decisions” (95). Inanimate objects are no longer representatives of a present paralysis but evidence of painful change and growth: “stones on my table, carried by hand / from scenes I trusted / souvenirs of what I once described / as happiness” (94). A mention of “being separateâÂ?¦like a piece of furniture” reminds the reader of “Living in Sin,” but here the furniture is not static but a chamber of mysteries to which “things of your own” can be added (95). Where furniture in “Living in Sin” symbolized inaction and lack of communication, the piece of furniture in “When We Dead Awaken” is a catalyst for subtle action: “you begin to write in your diaries / more honestly than ever” (95). Darkness and light make appearances in the form of the “fellow-creature, sister” who is “dark with love” and helping to remake “this cloth of darkness,” followed by the implied emission of light in the “blue energy” at the end of the poem. The final three lines, presenting an image of darkness transformed, urge the lover to allow for the possibility of seemingly impossible growth, “a weed / flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing / the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief” (96). Varying line lengths and lack of a strict structure give the poem a tone of maplessness emphasizing the plight of the poet, who is lost “in the matrix of need and anger” (95). However, she retains a modicum of control through the use of slant end rhymes (“woodâÂ?¦head,” “keysâÂ?¦glass,” “skin âÂ?¦ vein âÂ?¦ skein”) and end-of-line assonance (“way âÂ?¦ stain,” “advancing âÂ?¦ trash âÂ?¦ hand”) (94-95).
With the next two poems in this time period, Rich continues to attempt to define human tenderness. “The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One” echoes the address-versus-definition puzzle of “Night Watch” in the line “Love: the refrigerator / with open door,” going on to compare the lovers with “ripe steaks bleeding / their hearts out in plastic film” and “sour leftovers.” The work of love is damaging and difficult: “your hands are raw with scraping / the sharp bark, the thorns / of this succulent tree.” Nor does this work always result in success: “Pick, pick, pick / this harvest is a failure” (98). The poem offers no end-of-line punctuation, making it difficult to immediately distinguish end-stopped lines from run-ons, perhaps representing the struggle of the poet to discern possibility or hopelessness. In “Hunger,” written in 1974-1975, Rich directly states her doubts about the relationship:
âÂ?¦I’m wondering
whether we even have what we think we have-
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. (136)
The light in the windows represents a respite from the darkness that Rich has been exploring in her writing up to this point, but it may be illusory. The reassuring alliteration of “signifying shelter,” placed at the end of the line and stopped by a comma, indicates the poet’s desire to rest in the safety of that illusion, but she tempers that image with suspicion that the shelter may only be “a film” and “fragile.” In a lament that shows her maturation from the disillusioned idealism of “Ideal Landscape” and “Living in Sin,” the poet describes how “our powers [are] expended daily on the struggle / âÂ?¦to change reality for our lovers / even in a single trembling drop of water” (137). In the final two lines of “Hunger,” Rich shows a sense of integration between the physical and emotional, directly stating for the first time the singular importance of intimacy for survival in a difficult world: “The passion to be inscribes her body. / Until we find each other, we are alone” (138).
“Twenty-One Love Poems” demonstrates the poet’s eventual embrace of the contradiction inherent in intimate relationships. Contrary to the static nature of interaction in earlier poems such as “Like This Together,” in part II the poet expresses “the desireâÂ?¦ / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity, which is not simple” (144). The transformed motif of darkness appears in several places in the series. When Rich speaks of “my body both light and heavy with you,” “light and heavy” could refer to an emotional turmoil as well a sense of physical weight, with the physical body now fully integrated into the emotional self (145). In part XII, she and the lover are intimately together “even in sleep,” despite “light- or dark-years” between them in their separate dreaming (149). Part XVI joins dark and light as inseparable parts of the whole: “the halflight tracing / your generous, delicate mouth / where grief and laughter sleep together” (151). Rich explores expanded concepts of intimacy in “Twenty-One Love Poems,” acknowledging doubts and difficulties as part of the process of knowing another human being, as in part VII: “when away from you I try to create you in words, / am I simply using you, like a river or a war?” (146-47). Love cannot be uncomplicated, as she explains in part XI with the image of volcanoes, in which “[e]very peak is a craterâÂ?¦ / No height without depth,” and the foundation of the life created with one’s lover is a “slowly altering rock” (148).
Whereas early poems such as “Like This Together” presented an image of physical togetherness with no emotional connection, part XVI of “Twenty-One Love Poems” demonstrates a bond of intimacy that transcends physical separation. Yet the poet allots equal importance to her “own animal thoughts” in part X because “voices of the psyche drive through the flesh / further than the dense brain could have foretold” (148). “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)” expands on the pervasive nature of physical intimacy; Rich shows that making love as a physical act is not divorced from emotion, with the lover’s touch “tender” and “protective,” just as the emotional relationship’s past and future is “haunted” by this physical intimacy, “whatever happens” (150). The emotional and the physical are both vital to intimacy, and this is what Rich means by tenderness when she says that without it, “we are in hell” (148). In part XIX, she emphasizes the necessity of tenderness as the central element in a lasting relationship:
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine-
look at the faces of those who have chosen it. (153)
The poet’s understanding of the necessity of “fierce attention”( first encountered in “Like This Together”) has come to fruition, expanding to include insights about complications particular to her experience as a lesbian.
“Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” written in 1983-1985, explicitly summarizes Rich’s hard-won understanding of the nature of intimacy. She explains that “our lives will always be / a stew of contradictions” and that there will be moments when “our bodies plod on without conviction / and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer / arsenal of everything that tries us: / this battering, blunt-edged life” (203). Rich’s choice of short and forceful words (such as in “our thoughts cramp down”) and the use of assonance in “our bodies plod on” lends these lines a tone of drudging perseverence. The image of “cramp[ing] down” revisits the recurring imagery of paralysis in earlier poems, reminding the reader that intimacy is an unsteady process, not a final perfect destination. However, to “plod on” is nevertheless a kind of forward motion (203).
Adrienne Rich’s poetry has explored in detail the nature of intimate relationships over a period of thirty years, beginning with disillusionment caused by unrealistic expectations in “Ideal Landscape” and continuing through her embrace of the difficult work of true intimacy in “Contradictions: Tracking Poems.” Her work has mapped out uncharted territory of both personal and global significance. Rich’s poetry expresses not only the experiences of a woman, a feminist, and a lesbian, but the experiences of all human beings working to maintain intimate relationships in a difficult world.
