In her first leap from male-dominated metrics and themes, Rich produced “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law” (1963), a visually charged odyssey. Ironically akin to the dense verse of T. S. Eliot, the text moves through ten measured glimpses, each challenging the truth of preconceptions about the female individualist. The focus, a Shreveport belle, enters stanza 1 with studied grace. Well-schooled in womanliness, she performs a musicale, one of Chopin’s piano confections. By the end of the poem, the persona has achieved a transformation “long about her coming.” No longer the precious, static model of femininity, she accepts the challenge to “be more merciless to herself than history.”
The poem’s inner structure is a self-willed passage over a treacherous mindscape. From a psyche “moldering like wedding-cake,” the daughter-in-law departs from self-abuse and from becoming masculinized, like “the beak that grips her.” Jettisoning the trappings of fashion and custom, she battles “ma semblable, ma soeur!”—”my double, my sister!” The doppelganger motif places the speaker in merged roles—challenger and challenged—as she sheds constraint and uselessness, typified as “the whatnot every day of life.”
Crucial to Rich’s re-creation of woman is the rejecion of stereotypes—the sweetly laughing girl of Horace’s odes, the externally programmed lute player of Thomas Campion’s ditty. At the climax, the point beyond which life can never return to its old structures, Rich questions whether sorrow itself is a revitalizing force. Stanza 7 answers the question. For the first time, the poet cites a bold woman writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneer who suffered multiple criticisms for declaring that each must find “some stay,” the unshakeable anchor that steadies the rebel against convention. Unwilling to be a mere oddity, the one woman gifted with rare talents, the poet epitomizes change. Like the helicopter freighted with goods, she exults in a cargo
delivered
palpable
ours.
Her selection of a vertical delivery suggests that, for the motivated feminist, a satisfying arrival is a straight shot to earth, guided by gravity.
Rich has forged a reputation for powerful examinations of human politics. The most urgent of her explorations, “Diving into the Wreck” (1973), is less compressed than the previous poem, but no less urgent. She edges cautiously into the past through a controlling metaphor, the calculated moves of the deep-sea diver. The poet cloaks the first-person speaker in so much equipment that the identity is obscure. Armed with the myths of the past, the camera of the present, and a knife for unknown menace, the speaker departs a “sun-flooded schooner” by way of the mundane ladder. Again, like the helicopter drop that concludes “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” the motion is downward, a free fall to reality.
The stanzas, like cells in a movie, separate actions into the individual elements of a dive-climbing down, anticipating the ocean underfoot, drawing on containerized oxygen to power the body for peril. In line 36, the speaker warns of twin dangers: anoxia (a lack of oxygen), then the euphoria that threatens to overwhelm purpose. As is true of most of Rich’s canon, purpose controls the persona. With straightforward optimism, the speaker acknowledges, “I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” In strict parallelism in lines 62–63, the purpose surmounts the myth, establishing a mature, open mind-set. The pointed exposure of a female figurehead establishes that the wreckage is woman herself.
The discovery of lines 71–77 is the merger of sexual selves, male with female. The androgynous view strips analysis of a need to identify the speaker. The he/she persona immediately segues into another self, the victim, “whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes.” Rich’s explicit picture establishes that the harm done to the downed vessel has further corroded instruments that might have guided the way. In the final stanza, Rich reminds the reader of a crucial fact: that “We are, I am, you are” the seekers who carry past, present, and weapon against the unknown. For Rich, the future remains unrecorded.
