Monday, April 16, 2012

Language in "21 Love Poems"

I am most interested in the way Rich envisions language throughout these poems. In II, the speaker has written the poem of her life, but hesitates to show it to anyone. It does not seem to be out of dissatisfaction with the poem-- on the contrary, it seems to be because the poem too accurately describes her life for her to feel comfortable showing it off. At the end of V, though, she refers to civilization as an "act of translation, [a] half-world," which suggests the insufficiency of translation in referring to the world. She parts completely from the sentiment in II at the beginning of VII: "What kind of beast would turn its life into words?" This poem speaks of using words, and wonders how we live in them, but reaches no conclusion regarding the status of language's accuracy-- in fact, it ends in a question mark. In IX, she fears "this inarticulate life," is waiting "for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water/ for once," as it has not happened before-- as language has never done. Later, in reference to the same "inarticulate" lover, she writes, "You're telling me the story of your life/ for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words./ The story of our lives becomes our lives" (XVIII). There is no longer a question of how or if words correspond to our lives, but instead a declaration that are lives are, in fact, our words. She concludes in XX that when she had previously tried to speak, she "was talking to [her] own soul." The conclusion seems finally to be that, if language corresponds to anything, it is the self who speaks it-- and here lies the seat of its power, but the power of the speaker as well-- like in "Power," "her wounds came from the same source as her power." It is not that the language of the poem in II revealed the secret of her life, but the "poem of [her] life" came to being through these words; the poem and the life become one and the same.

No comments:

Post a Comment