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Support your point of view by reference to the poems of Rich on your course.
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Once again there is a
very clear topic sentence.
This provides the
paragraph with clear
direction.
The paragraph
provides makes good
use of quotation.
Quotation is often
most effective when
built into the fabric of
the sentence.
Much of Adrienne Rich’s poetry is autobiographical. ‘Living in Sin’, a
brilliantly observant and reflective poem, sees the poet looking back at the young
idealistic woman she used to be. She remembers how ‘She had thought the
studio would keep itself | no dust upon the furniture of love’. I think the poet is
clearly amazed at her youthful naiveté. She remembers living in the cold water
apartment and thinking it ‘half-heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, | The panes
relieved of grime.’ She captures the universal desire to believe in the power of
love and this helped me to relate to the poem. I believe anybody who has ever
experienced the pain of the break-up of a relationship can relate to the poet at
the end of the poem when she talks about how ‘she woke sometimes to feel the
daylight coming | like a relentless milkman up the stairs.’ I loved this ending to the
poem, and found it refreshing that she was able to look back on a painful
memory with humour and insight.
The maturity obvious in ’Living in Sin’ is also apparent in this poet’s two most
fascinating poems, ’From a Survivor’ and ’Trying to Talk with a Man’. These
poems deal with the poet’s feelings following the suicide of her former husband,
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Alfred Conrad. Their honesty is compelling. The idealism of youth is again
referred to in ’From a Survivor’ when the poet says “The pact we made was the
ordinary pact of men and women in those days.” She loved her husband when
she married him, but time and reflection has made her realise “we didn’t know /
the race had failures of that order / and that we were going to share them.” This
is a very moving and plaintive expression of the poet’s feelings. In ’Trying to Talk
With a Man’, I learned her marriage had been troubled for a long time, and she
felt “an acute angle of understanding / moving itself like a locus of the sun into
this condemned scenery.” She talks of looking into her husband’s eyes and
feeling “your dry eyes are stars of a different magnitude / They reflect lights that
spell out: Exit.” I was amazed by the directness and the maturity of these lines.
The fact that she can look back on the end of a relationship with such a clear eye
is an aspect of Rich’s poetry that intrigued me. That is particularly true when you
read ’From a Survivor’ and realise that Conrad is “wastefully dead”, having taken
his own life. Rich describes the “leap we talked too late of making”, and how
making that leap has meant that her new life is “a succession of brief amazing
movements.” The brilliance with which the poet deals with such powerful
emotions and complex relationships is an aspect of Rich’s work that appealed to
me.
The final sentence of this paragraph works very well. Notice how it
compliments the paragraph’s topic sentence. The best paragraphs
work in this fashion.
This concern is dealt with in ‘The Roofwalker.’ In that brilliantly thoughtful and
thought-provoking poem, the poet describes how ‘Giants, the roofwalkers | on a
listing deck, the wave | of darkness about to break | on their heads.’ The giants
are symbolic of the patriarchs of literature, the men whose style Rich has
learned, and upon whose work she has modelled her writing. There is an
awareness in the poem that the time for male dominance has come to an end.
The poet must find a new style, a distinctively feminist voice, because she ‘lay -
with infinite exertion - a roof I can’t live under’. This poem, written in 1962, clearly
reflects the poet’s growing need to express herself as a woman, free from the
influence of men. She knows this will be difficult, and feels ‘naked, ignorant’. The
sense is that the struggle to find her voice as a feminist writer will be difficult, but
she must take the chance. That awareness of the pain implicit in the struggle for
women’s liberation, equality and rights is The inclusion of a personal also
evident in her most overtly political poem, statement is welcome at this
‘Power’. The poem, written in 1978, point in the essay. This helps
reflects back on the struggle radical to keep the essay question
feminists went through to excavate ‘One focused.
bottle amber perfect a hundred year old | Cure for fever or
melancholy a tonic | for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.’ I was
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fascinated by these lines. I loved the sense that the poet was writing in a stream
of consciousness and that the precious bottle that has been excavated
represented women’s rights, won after a long struggle. Of course, it is easy to
take the equality of the sexes for granted in our modern world, where legislation
exists to prevent discrimination based on gender. That is why it is interesting,
from an historical perspective, to see the poet describe the long hard struggle
women have had to endure to achieve these rights, which she brilliantly
describes as “a tonic for living on this earth.”
Of course, the central figure in ‘Power’ is Marie Curie, the great Polish
chemist who, for Rich, symbolises the feminist struggle . The decision to employ
the image of Curie is typically insightful and clever. Curie had to suffer to achieve
greatness, as the visceral description of the “cracked and suppurating skin of her
finger-ends” proves. Rich employs Curie as a symbol for the pain women have
had to and will have to endure to achieve equal status with men. This use of
symbolism is one of the most memorable characteristics of Rich’s work. Her use
of metaphor and figurative imagery really is remarkably effective. In ‘Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’, the image of ‘her terrified hands […] still ringed with the
ordeals she was mastered by’ effectively captures the suppression of women,
just as the image of the ‘tigers in the panel that she made […] prancing, proud
and unafraid’, captures the resilient spirit of the aunt and of all women. Similarly,
in ‘Living in Sin’, the line ‘on the kitchen shelf among the saucers | a pair of
beetle eyes would fix her own’ is remarkably effective. There is no escaping the
horrified sense of realisation felt by the young woman who has committed herself
to a doomed relationship. However, the most effective use of metaphor and
symbolism in Rich’s poetry lies, for me, in ‘Trying to Talk With a Man.’ In this
extraordinary poem, the poet’s relationship with her husband is compared to a
desert. She talks about “an acute angle of understanding | moving itself like a
locus of the sun | into this condemned scenery’. She is using metaphor in a
memorable and innovative way to communicate her sense that her relationship
with her husband has failed. This extraordinary use of figurative language
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continues in the poem as she describes the emotional distance she feels in her
marriage by using a combination of sibilance and metaphor – ‘walking at noon in
the ghost town | surrounded by a silence | that sounds like the silence of the
place | except that it came with us and is familiar’.
These personal statements are
strengthened by use of technical
vocabulary.