Stephanie Newman
English 90qp Final Paper
Adrienne Rich
Language and Limits in “Twenty-One Love Poems”
When Rich writes in “Twenty-One Love Poems” of a middle-aged romantic
relationship, she memorably declares: “At forty-five, I want to know even our limits”
(III). This line provides a level of insight into the poem that reaches far beyond its
initial impression. Surely, in many senses, “Twenty-One Love Poems” is a work
centered on the idea of limits. We can easily recognize that the content of the poem
is rooted in a relationship between two female lovers who eventually separate,
thereby revealing the limits imposed on even the most passionate relationship.
Moreover, though Rich begins the poem with the call “to grasp our lives
inseparable” from the context in which we live (I), the poem ends with the marked
creation of a boundary: “I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle” (XXI). And
perhaps most interesting are the limits of language itself in the poem, as language
acts as the medium for both communication and art and serves as the means by
which life transitions to representation. In closely examining how Rich treats the
concept of language and its limitations in “Twenty-One Love Poems,” language
becomes a lens through which to analyze the presence of other thematic limits in
the work: the limits that exist between self and lover, and especially those that exist
between private life and social culture. By detailing how the notion of language is
presented in the poem, particularly in Stanzas V and VII, and then moving on to
consider the relationship between language and form in the poem, this paper aims
to shed light on the limits between self and lover, private and social life, in “TwentyOne Love Poems.”
In keeping with the first stanza’s gesture of inseparability, Rich’s initial
representation of language in the poem involves its indivisibility from life and from
her lover, as she dreams that her lover herself is “a poem I wanted to show
someone” (II). Language is shown to be inseparable also from the world
surrounding Rich and her lover. Much like city screens that “flicker with
pornography, with science-fiction vampires, victimized hirelings” (I), language soon
bombards Rich with evidence of the outside world’s atrocities.i In Stanza III, Rich is
forced to confront “a Xerox of something written by a man…tortured in prison,” and
she cries upon reading his account: “My genitals have been the object of such a
sadistic display / they keep me constantly awake with the pain…” (IV). Stanza V is
significant in that it marks the first time that Rich explicitly acknowledges
language’s capability to convey what is terrible in this world and also addresses
language’s limitations.
In the first line of Stanza V, Rich writes, “This apartment full of books could
crack open / to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes / of monsters, easily” (V). After the
invasion into the apartment of the horrific language of the Xerox, Rich notes that the
apartment itself could “crack open,” much like a book, and reveal in its folds
“monsters” that are frightening to behold. These monsters are further described as
“the underside of everything you’ve loved” (V). At this point, it feels as though Rich
is subtly admitting to the ominous possibility of discovering the unlikeable
“underside” of her very own lover. However, she skillfully ends the line with an end-
dash and initiates the following line by instead harkening back to the image of
torture from the previous stanza. She lists “the rack and pincers held in readiness,”
thereby subverting two seemingly harmless household objects into tools of torture,
and then shifts back to the human voice, continuing, “The gag / even the best voices
have had to mumble through, / the silence burying unwanted children— / women,
deviants, witnesses—in desert sand” (V). The voice here is put up to a test against
its limits; can even the “best” human voices make themselves heard through “the
gag” evoked by allusion to an atrocity like torture? “Silence” here is the human
voice’s antithesis; when the voice is unable to “mumble through” these horrors,
silence replaces it by “burying unwanted children.” Importantly, these “unwanted
children” are not killed but merely buried, just as acts of human ugliness still
capable of growing can be covered up but not terminated by silence. In enumerating
these types of “unwanted children,” Rich lists “women, deviants, witnesses,” and
seems again to refer not only to broad worldly figures, but also to herself and even
to her lover, who are both women, deviant from societal norms in their homosexual
relationship, and witness to the cruelties of the outside world.
Next, Rich moves back to the world of language by calling on literary
tradition: “Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books / so he can look at Blake
and Kafka while he types” (V). This man desires to open himself up to the lessons of
the literary past as he types his own work; he sets up his books so that he can keep
in view the “poet of human perfectability” and the “author of human oppression,”ii
as though reminding himself of human aptitude for both good and evil. The
“women” and “deviants” mentioned earlier begin to manifest themselves as the
subjects of other authors’ works. Rich references, “Swift / loathing the woman’s
flesh while praising her mind, / Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying
Gide” (V). The slant rhyme between “mind” and “Gide” gives these authors’
detestation a repulsive sing-song quality. The dangerous “underside” of language
reemerges, as these authors are imbued with a linguistic power to “loathe,” “dread,”
and “vilify” their subjects.iii
Death itself finally rears it head as Rich “reckon[s] with…the ghosts—their
hands clasped for centuries— / of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred
at the stake, / centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves” (V). Each of
these subjects is representative of silence: the “artist” who dies and can no longer
create art because of her female body, the “wise-women” who will no longer be able
to use their sharp minds, and the unwritten books that carry no language forth. Yet,
the paradox of the “buried children” resurfaces, as Rich observes that we still must
“reckon with…the ghosts” of these silenced figures. Rich continues, “We still have to
stare into the absence / of men who would not, women who could not, speak / to
our life” (V). This is the stanza’s ultimate recognition of language’s limit, as we “stare
into the absence” of language that is silence. The line break after “speak” is
brilliantly indicative of the dual meaning in Rich’s verses. The men and women she
refers to seem not only to be those who “would not” or “could not” speak in general,
but also those who “would not” or “could not” specifically “speak / to our life”—in
other words, those who were incapable of using speech to relate to, defend, or
represent a particular lifestyle. It seems that in addition to the men and women who
are at fault for this lack of speech, language itself carries some blame for being too
limited to fit the needs of “our life.” Again, “our life” echoes with reference to Rich’s
personal homosexual relationship, but she pushes the phrase forward: “Our life—
this still unexcavated hole / called civilization, this act of translation, this halfworld” (V). The mention of the “still unexcavated hole” also responds to the “buried
children” from earlier in the stanza, as what remains to be excavated are these
“unwanted children” buried by “silence”—the “monsters” of issues that must be
pulled from civilization’s silent hole. Further, these issues must be dealt with
through use of language in an “act of translation” from a mode of antiquated
existence to a new, more accommodating one. This is not just a project of language,
but also the project of “our life,” and the “half-world” ending the stanza appears to
stand in for exactly such a work-in-progress. And so, while Stanza V addresses the
shortcomings of language and the dangers of its counter-part silence, it also begins
to impart on language the responsibility to prevent such silence, and with it, the
social oppression that leaves “artists dying in childbirth” and “wise-women charred
at the stake.”
This sense of language’s responsibility is carried into Stanza VII, where Rich
asks, “What kind of beast would turn its life into words? / What atonement is this all
about?” (VII). This opening question probes the project of “translation” set forth by
Rich in Stanza V. Why do human beings, subject as “beasts” to “animal passion” (I),
choose language to represent their lives? The question that follows a line later
suggests that this impulse towards language is explained by the notion of
“atonement” for the world’s atrocities, or for something else that Rich contemplates
in the subsequent lines. In introspective reverie, she concedes, “And yet, writing
words like these, I’m also living” (VII), implying that the act of living is both opposed
to and inseparable from “writing words” and from “atoning.” She searches further,
wondering the extent to which civilization is accountable for our language, or
whether language’s roots lie in the calls of wild mammals: “Is all this close to the
wolverines’ howled signals, / that modulated cantata of the wild?” (VII). Of course,
this begs the question of whether “atonement” itself is limited to the human world,
or if the “modulated cantata of the wild” also implies penance for a worldly offense
that must affect all living things.
Rich addresses her next question to her lover: “When away from you I try to
create you in words, / am I simply using you, like a river or a war?” (VII). This
inquiry implies that employing language to represent life, or humans in our life, is
perhaps not as not as noble as it appears to be in Stanza V. This use of language can
itself become a sin of sorts—an exploitation. Rich compares “using” her lover in
writing to using “a river or a war,” as though her lover can be used like a river
simply as a means for transportation, or used like a war to wage the battle that is
“this act of translation” (V). Of course, the “river” and “war” are subject to the
language that draws on them, and Rich accordingly asks, “And how have I used
rivers, how have I used wars / to escape writing of the worst thing of all” (VII). She
recognizes her linguistic tendency to turn the river and the war into strategies for
“escape,” or avoidance of confronting in words the “worst thing.” In what seems an
answer to her question of atonement, Rich describes this “worst thing of all” as “not
the crimes of others, not even our own death, / but the failure to want our freedom
passionately enough” (VII).
The implications of such a revelation extend far beyond atonement, though.
The “failure to want our freedom” is worse than both “crimes” and “even our own
death.” It is a sin of omission rather than commission; it implies a limit on human
desire for something Rich seems to hold invaluable: freedom. Or perhaps more
accurately,
freedom
from
oppression,
closed-mindedness,
and
lack
of
understanding—from the “men who would not, women who could not, speak / to
our life” (V).iv This freedom must be noted as distinct from “escape”; it is not the
route by which to evade the responsibility of confronting the “unexcavated hole /
called civilization” (V), but rather, the end to which such a project will lead. The
term “escape” applies only in reference to Rich’s own hesitation to “writ[e] of” such
a failure. Yet, in openly recognizing her own limits by confessing her “failure to want
our freedom passionately enough,” Rich lives up to the responsibility that she has
endowed to language, and she “turn[s]…life into words” (VII).
Rich ends the stanza questioning the supposed result of this failure: “Blighted
elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem / mere emblems of that desecration of
ourselves?” (VII). The “exuberantly budding” trees of Stanza I have become here
“blighted elms,” the river is now “sick,” and the war is depicted more dreadfully for
its “massacres.” Compared to the magnitude of “the failure to want our freedom,”
however, these things are reduced to “mere emblems” of an enormously construed
“desecration of ourselves.” This phrase—“desecration of ourselves”—is haunting. It
suggests a simultaneously personal and collective defilement brought on by our
own failure, and once more, the first-person plural pronoun “ourselves” resonates in
terms of Rich and her lover, but also proves inclusive to all humankind. The “failure
to want our freedom passionately enough” does not just reflect on the failure of Rich
and her lover to want freedom for their homosexual relationship, but also on human
beings’ failure to want freedom in its largest definition. This certainly seems the
ultimate limit in “Twenty-One Love Poems.”
In the remainder of the poem, this desire towards freedom is expressed as
freedom from the limits and burdens that language imposes. In Stanza XII, Rich
recognizes of herself and her lover: “The past echoing through our bloodstreams / is
freighted with different language, different meanings” (XII). Language is weighing
down their bodies and even the history from which Rich and her lover arise. A
stanza later, Rich seeks freedom in her exploration of “a country that has no
language” (XIII). As Rich separates from her lover, language seems to lose
credibility, and she treats it with flippancy and what even approaches mockery:
“Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure / Victorian poet called the salt
estranging sea” (XVIII). While the early stanzas of the poem consider the drive to
“turn…life into words” (VII), the later stanzas show an inclination towards the
opposite—the urge to depart from language in favor of the physical actuality of life,
as embodied by Rich’s statement, “The story of our lives becomes our lives” (XVIII).
Indeed, this impulse is represented most powerfully in the final gesture of the last
stanza: “I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle” (XXI). This statement
involves the same assertion of responsibility that has permeated the entire poem,
but in relationship to physical choice rather than linguistic choice.
Having arrived at these conclusions about how the concept of language is
treated in the poem—language’s ability in Stanza V to force us to “face / the
underside of everything you’ve loved”; its potential subversion into forms of
linguistic oppression and “loathing”; its dangerous “absence” that “[buries]
unwanted children” (V); its obligation in Stanza VII to serve the purpose of
“atonement”; and its use as an “escape” from “the worst thing of all” (VII)—it feels
only natural to zoom out and ask the overarching question: How is language, and in
particular poetry, working in “Twenty-One Love Poems?” Rich has put forth several
ideas about the role of language, but how does she use her linguistic craft to live up
to the responsibilities and choices she acknowledges in the content of her work?
The form of the poem can be discussed in terms of its two most distinctive features:
its shape and its length.
The shape of “Twenty-One Love Poems” is distinguished by its delivery in
discrete, numbered stanzas. It is easy at first to realize the basic effects and
limitations of this form, as the poem is only able to convey what can be called a
narrative in pieces, or a series of glimpses into the events of the love story and its
implications-at-large. But unquestionably, the shape of the poem also functions at a
much higher level. Each Roman numeral-designated stanza is dispensed to the
reader much like a linguistic package—quite similar to the “Xerox of something
written by a man” that is delivered to Rich in Stanza IV. The reader faces the poem
as Rich and her lover must face and deem themselves “inseparable” from “those
rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces” in the city (I). The defined
silences that occur in between stanzas speak to the relationship between language
and silence in the poem. Each silence can perhaps be called an “unexcavated hole”
(V), or “a pond where drowned things live” (IX). The packages of language that
follow each silence dig into this hole, reach into this pond, to “raise dripping” the
issues in the narrative that must be dealt with, and the long lines push these issues
as far as they can go (IX).v
In considering the length of the “Twenty-One Love Poems,” it is essential to
bear in mind that the length of the poem allows the narrative to occur in real time.
We are walked through the events of the relationship and its accompanying
reflections as they occur, and the poem becomes an experience that readers
themselves live throughvi. Not only are we led through the relationship, but we are
also led to realize on our own that the linguistic-social responsibility Rich puts forth
is as much ours as hers. After all, the “failure to want our freedom passionately
enough” is inclusive of the reader (VII), and the gesture for “the story of our lives [to
become] our lives” acts as impetus for the reader to shift focus from the poem to her
own life, where she too chooses to create a “chronicle of the world we share” and
imbue it with “new meaning.”
“Bombardment” is a word used and reused several times in Adrienne Rich’s later
poetry. In “Planetarium,” Rich writes of “the radio impulse pouring in from Taurus,”
and observes, “I am bombarded yet
I stand.” In “Power,” Rich notes that Marie
Curie’s body was “bombarded for years by the element / she had purified.” The
idea of “bombardment” in Rich encompasses the related themes of oppression,
victimization, and vulnerability to outside forces. In “Twenty-One Love Poems,” Rich
explores these themes in terms of internal forces, as well.
i
As quoted from footnote 5 in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, page 79.
ii
The observation that language has a dangerous “underside” is interesting when
held up against the tendency in Robert Lowell for violence to manifest itself in
language. Two poems of Lowell’s in particular—“The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket” and “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”—exhibit the violent impulse
iii
of Lowell’s language. Nonetheless, the “underside” of language to which Rich refers
is related more to violence of attitude than physical violence.
It is also interesting that while acute self-awareness is a strategy towards freedom
in Rich’s poetry, Lowell’s work displays a pattern of imprisonment by selfconsciousness (as in “Waking Blue,” when Lowell seems unable to escape his selfconsciousness and asks, “What use is my sense of humor?”).
iv
The formal choice of employing long lines to push towards freedom can be
contrasted to such a choice as James Wright made to convey a sense of confinement
in “A Poem about George Doty in the Death House,” where he uses the tight form of
octaves written in trimeter. Nonetheless, much as Rich moves towards poems in a
freer form in her later work (and even displays traces of iambic pentameter in
“Twenty-One Love Poems), Wright, in poems such as “A Blessing,” begins with the
suggestion of regular form and then departs from it.
v
Ashbery (“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”), Ginsberg (“Howl”), and late Rich all
demonstrate a movement towards poems of longer length. This pattern seems to
speak to the desire not only to include history within a poem or to aim for the “allencompassing,” but also to focus on the process rather than the product of
consciousness. Rich achieves this in “Twenty-One Love Poems” by setting the poem
in real time, whereas Ashbery opens his poetry to the realm of autonomous
linguistic connections.
vi