Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

The twenty-first entry in Adrienne Cecile Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems" culminates the series with an assertion of choice and agency. In the previous poems, we have witnessed a range of emotions and situations, from passionate love to regret, from intimacy to isolation. Here, the poem situates itself in an abstract landscape that transcends physical geography-"not Stonehenge / simply nor any place but the mind"-suggesting that the most consequential terrains are emotional and psychological.

Rich employs the symbolism of "dark lintels" and "blue and foreign stones" to evoke a primordial setting, akin to Stonehenge, which serves as a metonym for the ancient, the mysterious, and the spiritual. The "great round rippled by stone implements" hints at the continuous influence of history and memory, shaping our emotional landscapes much like tools shape stone. There's a sense of primordial consciousness here, a nod to the elemental aspects of human feeling and existence.

The line "the midsummer night light rising from beneath / the horizon" conveys the duality of light and darkness, an idea central to the entire collection. When the speaker says, "where I said 'a cleft of light' / I meant this," she is referring not only to literal light but also to illumination in a metaphorical sense: awareness, realization, and perhaps even hope.

This poem, more than the others, emphasizes the choice inherent in love and solitude. The speaker casts her mind back "to where her solitude, / shared, could be chosen without loneliness." This complex emotional state-solitude without loneliness-embodies a form of independence within interdependence, an ideal that is "not easily nor without pains to stake out."

Significantly, the speaker makes a conscious decision by the end of the poem: "I choose to be the figure in that light, / half-blotted by darkness, something moving / across that space, the color of stone / greeting the moon, yet more than stone: / a woman." Here, she accepts the dualities within her: light and darkness, movement and stillness, the elemental and the complex. But she is unequivocal in her final statement: "I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle."

This last line encapsulates a commitment to self-determination. To "draw this circle" is to define the boundaries of one's emotional and psychological space. It's a reclaiming of agency, a declaration that even amidst the complexities of love and the shadows of personal history, she can and will make her choices. And it is within this circle, which is both a limit and a form of freedom, that she situates her experience of love, replete with its contradictions, challenges, and moments of light.

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