Adrienne Rich And John Donne And Their Different And Similar Valedictions

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Adrienne Rich and John Donne and Their Different and Similar Valedictions Part 1: This poem dramatizes the conflict of the independence of women and is also written to her former husband. The speaker begins with the juxtaposition of the words “swirling” and “frozen”. Swirling implies a whirlpool, liquid, fluid image, while frozen implies stiff, hard and cold. Rich wrote this poem in the same year that she and her husband divorced, and it was probably a very difficult and emotional time for her. She seems to be conveying these feelings towards her former husband and the overall situation, especially in the second line of the first stanza. The “grammar” implies her wedding vows that turned, or betrayed her. With the use of “duress”(3), Rich implies that the speaker is writing under imprisonment or constraint; she cannot write what she wants to, but is being forced to write what her captors, i.e. society, want her to. It is also linked to the “grammar” in line 2 her wedding vows became, or always were, empty and had no meaning. The single line stanza in between the first and third stanza could relate to the possibility that the divorce was long and drawn out; thus, instead of being able to move on from her failed marriage, she was forced to think about it constantly and to deal with more physical and tangible items from her relationship, which did not allow her to heal the emotion pain of the break-up. The second stanza begins with a line that seems to address her husband directly; and that everything that follows in the stanza is directed at him. The second line could imply that the repetition, or repeated utterance, of trying to make their relationship work was like dying. The “pain” in the eighth line could be the pain that she felt in the break-up, but unlike a physical pain, which you can locate, it is mental pain that does not have a specific
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