Pathos and Promise

Many who are filled with dubiety when they spy another this volume of poetry in bookstore windows will be pleasantly surprised by Adrienne Rich's second book of verse. For Miss Rich is not playing a guessing game or constructing her work of the over-brittle, almost nervous niceties that appeal to a number of modern academic poets. Her poetry combines relaxed craftsmanship with an uncompromising clarity that gives new vigor to themes that are far from new.

Mortality and immortality as they combine in human beings, and especially in lovers, are the great motifs of her work. Time runs through all the poems, destroying what has been beloved and bringing forth new loveliness in its place with the renewal of seasons and of generations. And with this sense of time, there is great feeling for the imperfection of humanity, an imperfection that must be accepted, but not with possimism:

Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,

Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered

Now and again when most we sought perfection,

Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.

The human rose to haunt us everywhere,

Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

This is no condemnation of modern life, however. It is an expression of the cyclical quality of human life in any era. The joy and mystery of childhood pass, too:

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,

Where are you gone ...

When did I lose you? whose have you become?

Why do I wait and never hear

Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?

My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?

But despite the constant passing of things, ("... a man's whole life/Most rightly could be written, like his own,/ In terms of places he was forced to leave ..."), there is a final affirmation, an almost defiant optimism, in Miss Rich's work. In the fallibility and passion of human behavior she seems to find its whole beauty. "Be rich as you are human," her hermit cries.

In some of her quiet narratives of relationship between people, the poet reaches a colloquial ease that can hardly avoid comparison to Robert Frost, as in:

"Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,"

I said, but faltering, and the words went by ...

And that was all. He brought me to the door ...

and:

The night of Joel's death I slept alone

In this same room. A neighbor said she'd stay,

Thinking the dead man lying down below

Might keep the living from rest ...

And as in Frost's case, it is this gentle at-homeness with language that almost makes us overlook Miss Rich's skill in its use. Like him, too, she knows well the failures of life and of language, but sees in them the hope of final dignity and beauty:

What's left us in this violent spectacle

But kisses on the mouth, or works of will--

The imagination's form so sternly wrought,

The flashes of the brain so boldly penned

That when the sunset gutters to its end

The world's last thought will be our flaring thought?