Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems (IV)

          One of the great gifts poets offer us is self-discovery.  Not only in what they say, but also in what we learn as we think about what they say.

           I wrote the following letter but did not send it out.  Maybe I thought the commentary was too short, or the poem (which I love) was too slight, somehow, for the treatment I like to give poems.  Neither possibility, to  my mind, is true.  The commentary is not too short nor is the poem slight.

           But my commentary stayed on my desk, or more precisely in my computer.  As a few weeks passed, I kept ruminating on what I had written.  Ruminating, as when a cow regurgitates what it has eaten from one stomach to another, digesting it further, gaining some new nutrition from the already-chewed.  I think, in this instance, I learned from myself: That is, I wrote something and the thing I wrote taught me something about myself and about poetry.

           I love William Butler Yeats; this letter heads toward a major poem of his.  No poet in the twentieth century had more music to and in his words than Yeats.  And he was not saccharine: He had ‘a lover’s quarrel with the world.’ [The line is Robert Frost’s, and as he hoped it became his epitaph.].  He could in his own contrary way enunciate deep truths about humans and the condition we find ourselves in.  In “The Second Coming” he saw the “mere anarchy” that was threatening to overcome the world; in “Easter 1916” he saw how complex were the relations between unreflective obsession and revolution, and how little we humans understood the strange roots of revolution.  In his late poems, he revealed the link between madness and sense: odd, awkward, yet nonetheless compelling.

           But something in me resists Yeats. I believe I discovered why in writing about him and Adrienne Rich.  It has to do with love.  For Yeats, I recognized, love is an escape from the tawdry in our world, from death and destruction and evil.  For Rich it is something else, what Christopher Lasch called in a felicitous phrase a ‘haven in a heartless world.’  That love can be a resting place, a place where we can find the strength to continue, is what Adrienne Rich understands, and Yeats does not.  He wants that escape…

 From Twenty-One Love Poems

 IV

I come home from you through the early light of Spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store...I'm lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me. - For God sake hold it!
I croak at him - Hysterical, - he breathes my way.
I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here Comes the Sun...I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail,
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain...
Do whatever you can to survive.
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

           A long time ago, twenty-five or thirty years back, I had a student who stood out, both for his interest (sometimes contesting my own views) in poetry and for his attachment to reggae music.   I didn’t ‘get’ reggae music then, though I think I sort of do, now.  Anyway, his name was Pablo Conrad.  Odd sort of name, Pablo. 

           We have not been in touch for the years since them, although I have looked him up on the web and have found that he has taught music in public schools.

           I bring up Pablo because he was the son of Alfred Conrad, an economist who ultimately committed suicide, a tough circumstance for a young man who is his son to endure.  His mother was a poet, Adrienne Rich.  I did not know of his parentage at the time.

           I have long admired Adrienne Rich, as a poetry primarily, but also as a visionary who saw what a woman could be and deeply understood the constraints that have been placed on women since time immemorial.  A savage critic of patriarchy, she has been a sort of presiding genius of the modern movement(s) in support of women and their rights and their rightful but often thwarted aspirations.  Her first book was fine but conventional; shortly after, she began writing poems that celebrated the ‘otherness’ of Emily Dickinson ("I Am in Danger - Sir -") and the importance of the sister of William Heschel, the famed astronomer (“Planetarium”). 

           She published what is one of the most ‘influential’ poems of the twentieth century, “Diving into the Wreck,” which imagines a woman diver plunging deep into the ocean to explore the wreckage of the past, and discovering herself, and her gender, invisible:

 We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

 It was a clarion call to women everywhere to reclaim not only their past, but their suppressed identities.  When Auden wrote, “For poetry makes nothing happen,” he was being ironic.  He also was not thinking of Adrienne Rich’s poem.  For it did make things happen.

           Rich went through many changes, although following that second book she was always a feminist.  Strong feminist, anti-imperialist, Jew: she explored a lot of terrain in an oeuvre that is, I am convinced, one of the most capacious and accomplished of the past century

           Rich merged the personal and the political, although in the later years of her life the personal was sometimes in the ascendent.  The poem that headed this essay, and which we are about to embark on considering, is one of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” written to and for her lover and partner, Michelle Clift. 

          It has no rhymes at the end of lines, save for the identical rhyme “mail” and “mail;’ an internal identical rhyme, “delicious,” appears in one line.  Yet this quick survey of rhymes is insufficient.  The word “my’ recurs eight times in the poem; it is the possessive of “I” which likewise appears eight times.   (The two words, of course, rhyme with each other.)  The poem is told in the first person, and it is about her, about the “I’ who is speaking, and her claim on what she possesses, although in the striking final line it is what she does not possess that dominates.

          I think the poem owes something to Frank O’Hara, who wrote lyrics that reflect the moment in time that they record.  There is a ‘presentness’ here that is a far way off from what Wordsworth counseled, that poems, although about spontaneity, be recollections, things past that are remembered in the present when emotion does not as powerfully roil the speaker.   “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” Wordsworth wrote in a famous passage.

          There is no tranquility in this poem, nor are the words written in a past tense: “I come home…I’m lugging my sack…I dash….” 

          What is happening?  It is not hard make out from those first words, “I come home from you…”  The speaker is returning from being with her lover, and it is morning in an awakening season.

I come home from you through the early light of Spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store...I'm lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator

 It is an “ordinary” world. She has been shopping, as the “sack of groceries” attests.  Walking down the street she sees what is always there: a Dominican restaurant, the Pez Dorado; a discount store; a shoe store. All of this could be – and this is hard to do, even though it seems easy – a recounting of the ordinary activities of the quotidian (a fancy way of saying the daily, the stuff we live in every day). 

           Entering her apartment building, she encounters an elderly gentleman in the lobby.  He is in the elevator, she rushes across the lobby to get into it before the door shuts and the elevator rises:

                      I dash for the elevator
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me. - For God sake hold it!
I croak at him - Hysterical, - he breathes my way.

 We want to read carefully here, not because poems demand this (though they do!) but because these lines prefigure the dramatic conclusion the poem: Only on re-reading the poem, knowing where it is going, can we see that we have been going that way almost since the start.

           So here she is, dashing for the elevator so she doesn’t have to wait for another trip after its doors have closed and it has risen and then again descends.   The man is elderly, “carefully composed” – by history, by the structure of gender relations, we realize on re-reading yet again – and strangely “taut.”  The person who wants to get on the elevator is, it seems, a threat: A woman who is rushing with a paper bag of groceries towards his turf, an elevator so carefully composed that it should not be shared with this onrushing ‘woman.’  She cries out to him – not authoritatively but with a “croak” as he “lets the door almost close on me.” 

           And then that word in-between the dashes, “—Hysterical—,” which indicates both the note of panic in her voice, and has far deeper resonances.  “Hysterical,” which is what [men think] women are.  “Hysterical,” meaning over-emotional.  “Hysterical” which is the adjectival form of “hysteria.”  Ah, “hysteria.”   It comes from a Greek word, hystera, which translated means “uterus.”  She acts, croaking, as a woman, facing this elderly man, who seems to condescend to her presence.  “He breathes my way.”

                  The elevator having ascended, he elderly man now gone, she feels safe in her apartment.

I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here Comes the Sun...I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you.

Lovely.  Quotidian.  All is in the present tense.   Home in the kitchen, unbundling her groceries, making coffee, drinking coffee, listening to a song which echoes the opening “early light of Spring.”  [The song was written by George Harrison and first performed by the Beatles on Abbey Road.  It is worth noting that what she listens to is a cover by the noted woman singer Nina Simone.]   All “delicious.”  She still feels the physical presence of her lover, both the uplift of love and the physical recollection of the body and its substantiality: “still both light and heavy with you.” And she opens the mail.

                                                    The mail,
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain...
Do whatever you can to survive.

          She gets a pale copy, a Xerox, of a message from the world beyond the safe confines of her apartment.  What she encountered in the elevator, the elderly man’s disregard and his tinge of the cruel, is out there where people are hostages and “tortured in prison.”  The man who wrote the text of the Xerox recounts not just that the world is full of torture, but how cruel and  painful that torture is:  “My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display.”  People like to inflict pain. They are sadistic

           But it is not just the generic ‘people’ that Rich thinks of.  It is men, men who, in some fashion, love cruelty: “You know, I think men love wars…”   One thinks of the “elderly” man, “taut…carefully composed” who but for her cry – a “croak” really – would have let the elevator door close before her, leaving her stranded with the “sack of groceries” she has been “lugging.”  That man and his countless brothers, not the tortured man whose genitals have been so abused that he and the genitals have been put on display.

            She thinks, as either the imprisoned man has written or as she counsels herself, “Do whatever you can to survive.”  [It is worth noting that, although the lines about “genitals” and surviving refer, likely, to the man who has been tortured, they also look towards the ‘womanly’ realm that is about to appear boldly in the final three lines, which point toward a world where female genitals mark women out for sadism in a patriarchal world, and where being ‘female’ means that one must do whatever one can to survive.  Likely, both are being referred to here.]

 And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

           What remarkable lines!  After the spring light, the delicious coffee, the delicious music, the pleasurable comforts of home, the letter revives in her an “incurable anger” against a world which contains so much cruelty, so much war, so much implacable male anger against the female and the peaceable –  and love. 

           Her  wounds are, well, they are “unmendable wounds.” The impact of male anger, disdain, superiority are with her always, and cannot be cured or mended.  More, they are always ready to break out anew, as if whatever scabs have formed to cover the wound can be ripped away at any moment.    But it is not blood that overwhelms her, but tears, that the world is constructed so that men wreak violence upon it and specifically upon women.  She is ‘helpless’ as she cries at her recognition of the pain in the world, pain that is occasioned by men.

            “And they still control the world,” she thinks in this immensely sad penultimate phrase. 

           Yet this is a love poem.  The poem, which began with spring and her recollection of love and presence –“I come home from you….my body still light and heavy with you” ends with a profound sense of absence.  “You are not in my arms.”         

           Love is not immediately available, and she longs for it.  Its absence, too, pains her.

           I cannot help but think, reading the final phrase, of the poem that William Butler Yeats placed at the end of his Collected Poems.   It is a great and memorable poem, but also a problematic poem.  I do not like it very much.   It too ends with the image of a lover who (once) was in the poet’s arms:

          Politics

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.'    THOMAS MANN.

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

          What Yeats is arguing with is Mann’s proclamation that the political takes ascendance in our age.  Maybe, thinks Yeats, our only refuge from “war and war’s alarms” is love, physical love, being somehow safe and secure in the arms of one’s lover. Both poems end with this image, of the possibility of a lover’s arms.

          Yet the two poems are dissimilar.  Yeats – this is why I do not like the poem – wants to retreat from the world of “war and war’s alarms.”  I do not think this is what Rich is writing about.  She faces up to the control and cruelty of men in the world; she cries knowing the lasting the ills of patriarchy are ubiquitous and long. “They still control the world.”  She wants comfort, refuge, in this world, knowing of the need to “survive.”  But there is no sense, at least for me, that love is a final refuge.  Tomorrow she will, as she must, go back out into the world which is so cruel.  She will go shopping again, and walk the streets of her neighborhood.  The world she will go out into will still be a male-dominated world.  But, oh for a temporary haven!  Love can give that.

          Rich’s anger is “incurable.”  Yeats, wonderful poet though he may be, is somehow nostalgic for that lost time when love was all-encompassing and he did not have to think on “Roman or on Russian/Or on Spanish politics.”  Mussolini, Stalin, Franco – the poem was written in 1938 – can be avoided if only, if only, youth were to return and sexual love could once again consume him.  He wants escape; Rich wants temporary refuge.

           Adrienne Rich is painfully – painfully – aware at the end of this poem that what she has is anger, anger at a world which diminishes her and hurts her and hurts all women.  All she can do in this poem (though the corpus of her poetry argues strongly that one can and must fight back against the oppressive forces that control us) is “cry helplessly” and regret that love, at least in this instance, at least in the temporary present, is not present as she feels pain and anger, that love cannot  protect her and assuage her pain.   Yes, it is a love poem, but one that recognizes, and does not escape, the cruelties of the world she lives in.

          She looks at those cruelties in her poem.  Yeats wishes them away, in his.