On "Twenty-One Love Poems"
Judith McDaniel
The center of The Dream of a Common Language is a group of lesbian love poems, originally published as a separate booklet. . . . [I]n these poems Rich shows us a glimpse of the power generated by love, specifically the love of women for women:
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.
There is a special recognition in "your small hands, precisely equal to my own," the recognition that "in these hands / I could trust the world...." The strength in these poems is the discovery of the self in another, the range of knowing and identification that seems most possible in same-sex love: the encounter of another's pain, for example, leaves the poet knowing "I was talking to my own soul." Out of that sharing grows the ability to choose solitude "without loneliness," to define one's own sphere of action and growth:
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
The choice, here and in most of Adrienne Rich's poetry, is of a process, a way of becoming, rather than a narrowly defined end.
From Reconstituting the World (Spinsters, Ink: 1978).
Susan Stanford Friedman
Throughout "Twenty-One Love Poems," which form the structural center of The Dream of a Common Language, Manhattan serves as the alienating setting, representing the violent world which the lovers must inhabit, yet seek to transform with love and relationship. Just as H. D. started the Trilogy with her impressions of destruction on walking through her London neighborhood after a bombing raid, Rich began poem I of "Twenty-One Love Poems" with a walk through the city which produces images of violence. . . .
From Signs (1983).
Gertrude Reif Hughes
In these "Twenty-One Love Poems," Rich identifies her relationship to the atrocities and injustices that originate from the complex fact that she puts with such eloquent simplicity in poem 1: "No one has imagined us." All kinds of disabling self-conceptions issue from that enormity. By not officially existing, women who love women--whether as mothers and daughters, as sisters, as lesbians, or as colleagues and friends--have to struggle even to believe in the existence of their own love, let alone to live that love. "[F]ighting the temptation to make a career of pain" (VIII), women who love women must identify the injuries but refuse to be the injured party.
From Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich. (University of Michigan Press, 1984).
Alice Templeton
"Twenty-one Love Poems" especially challenges dominant cultural values and discourse while it exemplifies the internally dialogic, self-reflexive motion of Rich's poems. These short poems concern a relationship between two women which prospers but later disintegrates, a love made possible and impossible by the forces "within us and against us, against us and within us." In breaking silences about lesbian sexuality, "(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)" not only resists being coopted into the heterosexual cultural system it challenges but also resists being systematized even within the structure of "Twenty-one Love Poems." By dialogically resonating or "floating" as a detached signifier of desire throughout the entire collection, the poem keeps the collection from being facilely subsumed into a heterosexual system or being received as a mere trope of that system. Yet, again, the twenty-one poems rely on the readers' recognizing the ideologies associated with heterosexuality and conventional ways of reading against which these love poems position themselves.
From The Dream and the Dialogue. Copyright © 1994 by The University of Tennessee Press.
Jane Vanderbosck
Poem XI of "Twenty-One Love Poems, presents the female landscape in miniature. The She is both the "volcano" and the women who "scale the path." The "jewel-like flower" that grows on the side of the mountain has a physical corollary in the clitoris. Again, the female is not one thing any more than it is one place. It is everywhere, any place that women perceive to be "eternally and visibly female." Existing on the land and in the body, it is both Nature and Woman.
What is interesting about this particular lyric is not only how Rich parallels the natural and the womanly (the flower and the clitoris, the burning core and the glowing arteries), but also her belief that women have the power to name their environment as well as themselves. When Rich and her friend define the "jewel-like flower," the poet pointedly reminds the reader that the flower was "nameless till we re-name[d] her." "Renaming" is analogous to "re-vision" here; the flower--like an "old text" is seen "with fresh eyes" and given a fresh name. Like the sybils of ancient Greece, these women prophesy a mysterious vision that is not of this world. In the case of these modern sybils, the vision is an exclusively female one which they (rather than the male priests of the Greek sanctuaries) interpret by the act of naming.
From Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich. (University of Michigan Press, 1984).
Hayden Carruth
The heart of this book is a sequence of sonnetlike love poems--no, call them true sonnets. For if they do not conform to the prescribed rules, they certainly come from the same lyrical conception that made the sonnet in the first place, and it is long past time to liberate the old term from its trammeling codes of technique. Here is one from the sequence:
[Carruth quotes No. 11 from "Twenty-One Love poems"]
It is an outstanding poem but typical as well of Rich's way of writing: the genuinely literate sentences woven into genuinely poetic measures, cadences, and patterns of sound; the easy, perfectly assimilated classical allusion; the sense of immediate, unique experience; the details--here the female mountain and flower--turned into generalized insights of humane value. These are the resonances we find in all the poems. A mind is here, a loving mind, in and of this world, including all this world's cultural inheritance, yet still asserting, firmly and calmly, its own independence and newness.
From Harper’s (1978).
Cary Nelson
The sequence begins with what sounds like a typical speaking voice in the presence of an American city's decay. "Whenever in this city," she writes, "sirens flicker / with pornography ... we also have to walk" (DCL, 25). The passage may appear to be a complaint, but "have to" actually serves as ethical insistence: "We need to grasp our lives inseparable / from those rancid dreams." The mode, as with so much of contemporary American poetry, is an ironic continuation of the Whitmanesque embrace in a landscape that has degenerated into tenements and "rainsoaked garbage." She does not, however, want the irony to blunt the discomfort of the contradictory impulses, and the last lines state her willed hopefulness dramatically:
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exhuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
This tension between desire and actuality persists in Rich's poetry no matter how thoroughly her emotional aspirations are countered by American history. From the negative poems about America in Necessities of Life through the more decisively compromised poems in The Will to Change, her despair and anger at American culture coexists with her wish for a renewed vision of American commonality. It is not until Merwin that we find an unremittingly bleak inversion of the Whitmanesque aesthetic. Yet even Rich's feminist version of Whitman's democratic interconnectedness is convincing only when it is completely interwoven with historical impossibility. Rich works steadily at this effort to depict female power amidst "the earth deposits of our history" (DCL, 13) through the recent poems in Poems Selected and New, and The Dream of a Common Language. One failed version of the effort is "Not Somewhere Else, But Here," which is almost a feminist recapitulation of the technique of "Shooting Script," but with its associations transcribed too loosely:
Death of the city Her face
sleeping Her quick stride Her
unning Search for a private space The city
caving from within The lessons badly
learned Or not at all The unbuilt world
This one love flowing Touching other
lives Spilt love The least wall caving
In "Twenty-one Love Poems" we can see where this work must lead. Through most of the sequence, she succeeds in interweaving the ordinary, unspectacular environment, the special social pressures always at the edge of her awareness, the historical forces ranged against two female lovers, and their shared intimacies. The relationship is always "a flute / plucked and fingered by women outside the law." Yet she reserves a privileged site--sexual intimacy--for a poem that voices the desire to break free of public history, their individual past, and the politics of the relationship. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth poems she places "(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)." Enclosed, as its title is in parentheses, it is surrounded by and grounded in the twenty-one numbered poems. It is at once protected and threatened by them, and its opening and closing lines provide a passage to and from the concerns of the rest of the sequence: "Whatever happens with us," she writes at first, "Your body / will haunt mine," and closes with "whatever happens, this is" (DCL, 32). The sequence as a whole testifies widely to the paradoxical stresses in whatever happens," but this single poem, like Duncan's "Sonnet 4," reaches for a temporality all its own. The sequence's structure simultaneously gives and denies this poem that inviolability. This is Rich's most overtly erotic poem to date, and she may have simply been unable to politicize its intimacies:
[Nelson quotes "The Floating Poem"]
Except possibly for one excessively sentimental phrase "the innocence and wisdom of," a phrase whose conventionality suggests how difficult Rich found the poem to write "(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)" succeeds in being both tender and sensual. The comic playfulness of the alliteration in "half-curled frond / of the fiddlehead fern" and the edge of comic self-regard in "insatiate dance" give the poem's rapture a tonal complication from which it benefits. We may even hear in these lines a wry echo of the pervasive garden imagery of her earliest work, but in this poem at least we are not altogether removed from those "paths fern-fringed and delicate" of A Change of World where "innocent sensuality abides."
One reads the first part of the sequence wondering if any of the poems will risk more frank physical description. Given that sense of hesitant anticipation, it is emotionally appropriate that this pivotal poem be unnumbered and symbolically free of all historical entanglement. Yet one can also say that Rich has left the sequence with a project unfinished and perhaps still to come, one that would be even more challenging to her audiences historicizing of erotic pleasure. As Foucault has argued, the privileging of sexuality as a special site for authentic self-expression is itself historically determined. Foucault's challenge to our confidence in the ahistorical character of sexuality is implicit in much that Rich has previously written about relations between the sexes. Indeed her recognition here that lesbian sexuality is "outside the law" is historicized exactly as Foucault argues: it is both a prohibition and an inducement to a form of sexuality conceived in opposition to the dominant culture. As Rich herself has written, lesbianism is a conflux "of the self-chosen woman, the forbidden 'primary intensity' between women, and also the woman who refuses to obey, who has said 'no' to the fathers" (OLS, 202); the impulse toward "the breaking of a taboo" cannot be separated from that "electric and empowering charge between women"--"an engulfed continent which rises fragmentedly to view from time to time only to become submerged again." If Rich follows this project through to completion, it may lead her to write poems about female sexuality that have the deconstructive force of poems about American history like "(Newsreel)."
Yet Rich will have to acknowledge the cost of these insights--both to herself and to her audience. For where history and politics are concerned, knowledge does not necessarily produce freedom. And history touches even our simplest pleasures. "The moment when a feeling enters the body," she writes, "is political. This touch is political" (WITC, 24). By focusing on what the poem itself can actually do (or fail to do) in the presence of that unacceptable, undeniable reality, Rich also creates a compelling record of our other human options. They are fewer and they are more problematic than her exhortatory poetry would lead us to believe. Yet we are also more driven to choose that small ground on which some witness can be given, for we are ourselves already being chosen by "the cruelty of our times and customs" (PSN, 234).
From Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Copyright © 1981 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Mary J. Carruthers
One sees this epic theme developing fully in the middle section of The Dream of a Common Language, but articulated in a form conventionally associated with intimate romance materials. "Twenty-One Love Poems" is modeled upon the traditional sonnet sequence, though Rich. substitutes for technical sonnets poems varying between thirteen and twenty lines. They outline the story of a love affair, moving from union to estrangement, with the focus firmly upon the meditative "I" of the poet. This sequence is, as it traditionally has been, the love poetry of a conscious mind, for love is a disciplined and intelligent social art. It goes without saying that the lovers are women, and in her treatment of this subject lies the revolutionary nature of Rich's sequence. The world of the love affair is not "closeted," not closed off in romance; it is an epic world which shadows forth the destruction of an old order and the founding of a new. Her bold destruction of generic expectations is part of her apocalyptic theme; only in a completely new world, it suggests, can sonnets be used seriously for epic material.
From the beginning, the affair plays itself forward within a dying civilization:
[ . . . ]
It is the obligation of the poet, even in love, to "speak / to our life—this still unexcavated hole / called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world." The love affair is not an escape from the civitas (as it traditionally, at least since Dido, has been) but a means of redeeming it through the establishment of a new order:
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—
only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands
I could trust the world . . .
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.
This is a vision of social and moral renewal, not of orgasmic transcendence, and it indicates the precise relationship for Rich between the bonding of women and social transformation. The Lesbian love bespeaks a new moral, social order, and if it seems to have more in it of hand-holding than of liebestod, that is precisely why Rich can make it the basis of an epic rather than the ending of a tragedy. It is significant that the sexual consummation poem is called "Floating," and can be read at any point in the sequence. As she writes,
is scarcely the story,Tristan und Isolde
The love affair ends as the lover goes off "in fugue," but its legacy is a self recognized as whole and creative, together with a vision of a new social order. The act of breaking from her lover, paradoxically, by leaving her alone brings her to realize her own power and value:
I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn
pushing toward daybreak.
She also realizes that the world in which she now lives is hostile not only to women but to bonding, civitas, of any sort:
If I could let you know—
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness . . .
—look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Yet the apparent loneliness is really a rebirth:
Can it be growing colder when I begin
to touch myself again, adhesions pull away? . . .
Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream
or in this poem, There are no miracles?
(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,
this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)
That life is sustained by the dream of community, a mythic place beyond history, "not Stonehenge / simply nor any place but the mind," where the poet, alone in a "shared" solitude of dawn, "the great light," chooses to draw her magic circle, in effect beginning civilization again. It is apparent that the relationship of the magic circle to the daily life of Manhattan exists only psychically, and by a struggle "heroic in its ordinariness."
from "The Revision of the Muse: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas." The Hudson Review 36.2 (Summer 1983).
Joanne Feit Diehl
Rich's poetics of transgression become a source of "truth" in her "Twenty-One Love Poems." In the center of the book, she enacts the poetic theories she asserted in the volume's beginning and the assertions she will return to at its close. Here Rich attempts to make a poetry that refuses to succumb to the lies she must utter while living within the confines of a heterosexual culture. These poems demonstrate the difficulties of fusing a poetics out of politics, for they raise a question fundamental to Rich's project: If women have been stifled by being kept in a heterosexual society they reject, can a rejection of that society's mores itself free the poet, and thus restore to her the capacity of originative language? On this subject, Rich elsewhere remarks that "heterosexuality as an institution has also drowned in silence the erotic feelings between women. I myself lived half a lifetime in the lie of that denial. That silence makes us all, to some degree, into liars."
To express, openly and without hesitation, her feelings as they develop in a lesbian relationship becomes a way of escaping the "silence and lies" which heretofore governed "women's love for women." Out of this assertion of truthfulness, Rich discovers, in her own terms, new possibilities for "truth": "When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her." The relation of a lesbian ontology to the poetic praxis is not, however, so direct as Rich would have us believe. Merely to eliminate an overt stigma, to reject the veil of obfuscation, will not of itself produce good poetry no matter how liberating a gesture for the poet's psyche. What this lesbian relationship, as a ground of experience, does offer the woman poet, is the possibility of escaping the anxieties of male-dominated poetic influence. Ideally, Rich can thus draw on both female and male precursors while maintaining the authority that comes from a description of life that at once taps the more generally recognized emotions associated with eros, while simultaneously centering the poetry in a relationship that excludes the male consciousness--hence, the male poet. Helpful though sexual truth-telling may be, however, it does not resolve the more difficult problem these poems so starkly articulate: the difficulty of reinventing names for experience, of placing the female Self at the center of this mimetic process. In her essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Rich discusses the relationship between woman's survival in this world and man's authority as the one who names what we experience:
And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name and therefore live-afresh.
The politics of experience becomes in The Dream of a Common Language a question of style; for the poems either assert in a strong rhetorical voice or enact in a more muted conversational manner, the distinction between gender-based differences in language. As Rich herself states, "Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language." More specifically in the "Twenty-One Love Poems," Rich proceeds to make a myth out of the dailiness of her experience; because, as she asserts, "No one has imagined us." The female poet, like Adam in the Garden, can name rather than rename the world around her. This transference foremost allows the woman to be both subject and object of consciousness, the agent of desire and its aim. The poems' language, their attempts to bear witness to the individual, private quality of an intimate relationship, moves between tones of understatement and forthright assertions of the difficulties sustaining such a poetry in the face of a tradition of silence, in the face of "centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves." What these poems seek to accomplish is to combine a self-consciousness associated with starting an alternative poetic ground based on a lesbian relationship, a world without men, and an attempt to convert a specific intimacy into a paradigm that maps the possibilities of such a relationship for a radically alternative poetics. Rich confronts the inherent problem of combining these aims as she questions the mythopoetic enterprise itself--the conversion of private experience into an alternative program: "What kind of beast would turn its life into words? / What atonement is this all about?" (VII). But Rich sees this attempt also as a kind of evasion from the even more disruptive goal of centering the female self and making that self the origin for naming all that stands outside it:
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
(VIl)
The question of renaming the world is at the heart of these these poems because Rich perceives the necessity of escaping the boundaries of convention to make a new world "by women outside the law" (XIII). These poems also mirror the conviction that only by choosing one's own life freely and by making one's choice into a language can women begin to redefine poetry, appropriating for themselves the power of naming. The "Love Poems" close with Rich's assertion of the autonomy she seeks and the corollary mythos she creates through them:
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
(XXI)
Echoing Aurora Leigh's decision, "I choose to walk at all risks," Rich shares her choice; the tradition reaffirmed continues.
From Feminist Studies (1980).
Claire Keyes
The "Love Poems" are extraordinary not simply because they declare one woman's love for another woman, but because they transcend sex. The poems are not narrowed by the focus on lesbian love but expanded. By abjuring her willful quest for "a voice no longer personal" and dealing with extremely personal subject matter and her own voice, Adrienne Rich paradoxically achieves what Carruth terms "generalized insight of humane value."
Granted, some of the poems tie their significance tightly to a strictly female imagery. Poem 6, for example, speaks of the beloved's "small hands, precisely equal to my own." The speaker says that "in these hands / I could trust the world, or in many hands like these." The poem asserts Rich's preference for women in positions of power and extends her vision of women's capabilities. In poem 12 she speaks of "two lovers of one gender / ... two women of one generation." And in the "Floating Poem, Unnumbered," the subject is the lovemaking between two women: "Your traveled, generous thighs / between which my whole face has come and come." Despite the specific focus and explicitness of poems such as these, the majority of the love poems achieve a universal significance.
Poem 3, for example, describes the emotional climate at the beginning of the love relationship. When one is middle-aged, falling in love contains a quality of excitement and joy unavailable to the young. As the poem moves toward its conclusion, the tone, modulates:
[Keyes quotes the poem]
No longer young, the lovers must make up for time lost when they were not loving each other. They must not waste time because they do not possess the luxury of unspent decades. Yet this is not a lover's complaint, but a paean to love at forty-five, a reciprocated love that gives birth to the image of the beloved's eyes, which are "everlasting." The speaker notes the color of these eyes and their kinship with the "green spark / of the blue-green grass of early summer." This image defies age or aging, yet the speaker insists on loving without illusions. She wants "to know even our limits." The poem concludes on a note of somber tenderness in a voice eminently mature. She is not so transported by the joy of love and the contemplation of the beloved that she loses sight of their finiteness. She imagines that finiteness shared, which tempers the solemnity of the last line: "and somewhere, each of us must help the other die."
A comparison with Shakespearean sonnets and this one by Adrienne Rich need not be glib. Both set the praise of the beloved within the context of time passing. Both mix realism with idealism. In each, the felicity of phrase makes for memorable lines. In this comparison, Rich suffers in terms of quantity, but her themes are as sonorous and as deeply felt. While the reviewer Olga Broumas does not mention Shakespeare, she does find the 'Twenty-One Love Poems" striking and states that "The gesture of these poems is one of desire for a totality of living, openness, communication and trust, in the new, the immediate, the real" (Reading Adrienne Rich, p. 280). She goes on to cite the first and nineteenth in the sequence and mentions her own expectations for "twenty-one poems about love" and what she found: "one long poem, in twenty-one sections, about a deep and anguished proximity of two lives" (p. 280). No one can read these poems without sensing that "anguish," for these poems speak of the difficulties of a loving relationship and of the "work / heroic in its ordinariness" of "two people together" (poem 19). These poems also speak of the collapse of the "dream of a common language" and a heightened awareness of solitude: the poet’s essential, indeed primal, aloneness in the universal.
To illustrate some of these issues, the last poem in the series offers an appropriate and beautiful starting point. In this poem, lines 1-5 establish the setting, a place like Stonehenge, rendered in vivid images with one reference ("a cleft of light") to a previous poem. Lines 6-10 interpret the setting as a mind-set; and lines 11-15 place the speaker within the setting and articulate the theme: "I choose to be ... a woman." And, she implies, an artist:"to draw this circle."
[Keyes quotes the last poem in the sequence]
It is difficult to see this poem as a love poem. We search for the beloved and find only an oblique reference to "solitude, / shared.... chosen without loneliness." The love in this poem is for womanliness and can be seen in the choice of setting, the time of year, and the image of the moon. The speaker's mind finds an image of itself in Stonehenge, an ancient site in England whose purpose remains shrouded despite much scientific analysis and speculation. What matters here is that the speaker responds to its spiritual resonances and its connection to the moon. It is a woman's place in its shape--a "great round" suggestive of the womb. At midsummer, even to this day, rituals are held at such places to celebrate the harvest, the bounty given by Mother Earth. The moon, a female image, just as the sun is an image of male power and light, is "the midsummer nightlight." The speaker's point is that it has taken her a great deal, "not easily nor without pain" to reach this place. That is, she becomes aware of the utter centrality of her womanliness and her connection to an ancient, prehistoric sense of the earth as the female principle and of herself as "something moving / across that space ... / a woman." Rich stresses the role of her consciousness when she emphasizes: "I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle." In coming to love the womanliness of her mind and its images, she comes to love herself. This love is not solipsistic, but radiant. It glows in "a cleft of light."
For the thematic significance of light we have to go back to love poem 18, where Rich first uses the phrase "a cleft of light." In her first reference she is unsure what she means by it, but it appears in a context where Rich experiences her aloneness even from the beloved woman:
I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn
pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light--?
Close between grief and anger, a space opens
where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.
We could read the estrangement as something positive that leads toward the light, or greater understanding. It is "dawn / pushing toward daybreak." Estrangement thus becomes merely the parting between night and day. Traditionally, this is a life-affirming, optimistic image pattern, except in an aubade, where in the morning a lover has to part from the beloved. In this context, sunrise is regarded as cruel, lovers preferring the dark. The dawn's coming implies, therefore, a separation, a "cleft of light." The speaker is not warmed by the sun, but is "colder." At the end, a more serious theme emerges. The end of the love affair occupies the speaker and makes her aware of her essential aloneness. A "cleft of light" is, then, the finale of "the drive to connect" and the "dream" collapses.
Poem 21 takes the "cleft of light" image and transforms it to something beautiful, primitive, and mystical--a space like Stonehenge. In this space, Rich's persona assumes the role of high priestess. She seeks out "that light" and performs her rituals "to stake out / the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light." Indeed the structure of the image is reminiscent of "Planetarium," where the speaker does not stand in light but is instead "bombarded" by pulsations from the universe. She is "an instrument in the shape of a woman" trying to "translate" those pulsations. In effect, she is a poet. Love poem 21 exhibits an even stronger affirmation of the commitment to poetry, for the speaker "chooses to walk here. And to draw this circle." She may part from her beloved, but her connection to the universe and to womanliness is forged by her commitment to the spirit of poetry, which is "the drive to connect."
Rich's technique, as a whole, puts the detail outside of herself first ("the dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones") and then, through her syntax, makes the point that this place is not outside her, but within her. She employs the "not-nor" combination, proceeding toward greater clarity ("not Stonehenge / simply nor any place but the mind"). Thus polarities are resolved, harmony created.
From The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1986 by The University of Georgia Press.
Joanne Feit Diehl
[I]n "Twenty-One Love Poems," Rich proceeds to make a myth out of the dailiness of her experience, because, as she asserts, "No one has imagined us." The female poet can, as Adam in the Garden, name rather than rename the world around her. This transference allows the woman to be both subject and object of consciousness, the agent of desire and its aim. The poem sequence's language, with its attempts to bear witness to the individual, private quality of an intimate relationship, moves between tones of understatement and forthright assertion of the difficulty of sustaining such a poetry in the face of a tradition of silence, in the face of "centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves" (V). These poems seek to combine a self-consciousness associated with establishing an alternative poetic ground based on a lesbian relationship, a world without men, and an attempt to convert a specific intimacy into a paradigm that maps the possibilities of such a relationship for a radically alternative poetics. Rich confronts the inherent problem of combining these aims as she questions the mythopoetic enterprise itself--the conversion of private experience into an alternative program: "What kind of beast would turn its life into words? / What atonement is this all about?" (VII). But Rich also sees this attempt as a kind of evasion of the even more disruptive goal of centering the female self and making that self the origin for naming all that stands outside it:
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
The question of renaming the world is crucial because Rich understands the necessity of escaping the boundaries of convention to make a new world "by women outside the law" (XIII). Moreover, these poems mirror the conviction that only by choosing one's own life freely and converting one's choice into language can a woman poet begin to redefine poetry by appropriating the power of naming. The love poems close with Rich's assertion of the autonomy she seeks and the corollary mythos she would create:
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
Echoing Aurora Leigh's decision, "I choose to walk at all risks," Rich shares her choice; the tradition reaffirmed continues.
Yet such exclusionary tactics as Rich employs in the twenty-one love poems do not necessarily release the poet from her own linguistic anxieties; the word can never free itself of its accrued meanings as emotion here strives to do. If the woman poet discards traditional images, where will she discover her First Idea? Power inheres in the word; it cannot rid itself of centuries of connotation. Knowing this, Rich turns away from the outspoken word, the power of voice, to advocate a language that borders on silence. Thus the gesture of isolation, the exclusionary act itself, may, Rich speculates, provide an untainted source of female power. Consequently, the poems in this volume in various ways address the need to minimize language, to divest the word of its accretions of power by replacing it with actions identified as preserving and sustaining a woman's integrity.
From Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Copyright 1990 by Joanne Feit Diehl.
Roger Gilbert
Adrienne Rich continued to produce fiercely political poems throughout the seventies. Yet even she began to write in a more personal, lyric mode late in the decade, notably in her sequence "Twenty-one Love Poems." One of these poems, number 4 in the sequence, is particularly interesting for the way it anticipates the tension between pleasure and politics that would come to play so central a role in the eighties. In the very awkwardness of its closure it highlights the problem, while failing to invent a convincing solution:
[quotes poem IV of "21 Love Poems"]
Like many poems of the seventies, this one locates itself entirely within experience, in a unified lyric present unfolding under the sign of the poetic "I." Where the poem falters, I think, is precisely in its effort to make a single piece of represented experience assume the burden of reconciling, formally if not thematically, the conflicting claims of pleasure and politics. On one side fall the lovemaking that the speaker presumably is returning from, the "deIicious coffee, delicious music," the comforts of home and neighborhood; on the other side fall not only the Xeroxed testimony of the torture victim but the elderly man's inconsiderate elevator behavior, which acts as a metaphor for oppressive male authority in all its manifestations. These oppositions are drawn with Rich's usual precision and verisimilitude; it's only when her need to find some connection or causal link between the two expresses itself in the last line that the poem slips into bathos. In part the poem's overly emphatic closure may reflect its vestigial relation to the sonnet form, which hovers behind the entire sequence; but the immediate motivation clearly stems from Rich's desire to give her sexual pleasure a political meaning. "And they still control the world, and you are not in my arms": that second "and" seems almost to conflate the speaker's lover with the torture victim, as though the lover's absence were the result of state terrorism rather than the fact that the two women live in separate apartments. This jarringly melodramatic conjunction in fact reflects the profound incongruity between the speaker's experience and that of the tortured man, a gap Rich evidently feels compelled to deny in the interests of political solidarity.
Ultimately the poem's failure may have more to do with its allegiance to poetic conventions of closure, synthesis, and epiphany than with Rich's ideological stance. The significance of this poem lies in the way it frankly exposes the fault line between pleasure and politics while succumbing finally to the temptation of constructing a factitious bridge in order to reserve the illusion of experiential unity that its form requires.
from "Textual Information: Politics, Pleasure, and Poetry in the Eighties." Contemporary Literature 33:2 (Summer 1992).
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