The Writer's Struggle

A key theme in this poem is the difficulty of writing. The primary conflict in the poem is between the speaker and her own poem. She begins with a relatively straightforward expression of longing for another person, but then “the grammar turned and attacked me” (2). The language of the poem itself seems to revolt against the speaker, making it impossible for her to express the emotion that she is feeling.

The poem’s third stanza depicts the uneasy relationship between poetry and the pain it expresses in a series of images that the speaker asks her lover to “see” (6). She experiences “repetition as death” – the multiple cycles of writing and revision that it takes to express herself in poetry feels like an extinction of herself (7). “Criticism” fails to “locate the pain” (8). Rich’s poetry was often heavily criticized, both by literary critics and, particularly...