Poetry - Rich

Exam Structure, Marks, and Unpacking the Prompt

How the Prescribed Poetry Question is Examined

Prescribed poetry appears on Paper 2, Section III, Part B, carrying 50 marks (25% of Paper 2, or 12.5% of your total Leaving Certificate English grade). Eight poets are prescribed for Higher Level, and the paper sets questions on a selection of them — you answer on one poet only, so check which poets appear on your paper. The examination expects a sustained essay written in roughly 50 minutes: spend about 5 minutes planning and 45 minutes writing. This translates to an introduction, four or five substantial body paragraphs, and a focused conclusion.

Unlike Part A (the unseen poem), no text is printed on the examination paper for prescribed poetry. You must write about Rich's poetry entirely from memory. Memorising a focused bank of short, accurate quotations is essential.

Step 1: Break the Statement into its Parts (5 Minutes)

Leaving Certificate questions at Higher Level are rarely simple one-part prompts. They usually bundle two or three demands into a single proposition. Consider the 2022 Higher Level question on Rich:

“To what extent do you agree or disagree that Adrienne Rich makes effective use of a diverse range of imagery and an engaging style to explore structures and values in society which she considers to be negative or destructive?”

Before writing a single line of your essay, underline every distinct demand:

1. Diverse range of imagery: You must examine multiple varieties of imagery (domestic articles, desert wastelands, maritime wrecks, archaeological artefacts, medical suffering).
2. Engaging style: You must evaluate how she writes—her shift from formal metres to open free verse, dramatic personae, line breaks, pacing, and tone.
3. Negative or destructive structures and values: You must name the specific institutions and attitudes she challenges (patriarchal marriage, class complacency, militarism, linguistic distortion, historical erasure).

If a question asks "To what extent do you agree or disagree", you are invited to qualify the statement. Agreeing with nuance—or arguing that a poem like 'From a Survivor' moves past the critique of destructive structures into quiet self-renewal—demonstrates independent critical thinking.

Personal Response and Evaluative Stance

The syllabus requires you to show an awareness of your own intellectual, imaginative, and emotional responses. Use the first person ("I", "my") purposefully to offer critical judgements rather than emotional diary entries. Instead of writing “I loved the imagery in this poem”, write: “What I find most compelling about Rich's desert imagery in 'Trying to Talk with a Man' is how it transforms an emotional estrangement into a physical, environmental hazard.”

Artistic Evolution: From Disciplined Containers to Radical Free Verse

Rich's poetic career is an ongoing process of stylistic reinvention. Rather than maintaining one static voice, she changed her technique as her political and personal convictions deepened.

Early Work (1950s): Formal Discipline and Containment

Rich's earliest work from A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955) exhibits formal discipline of different kinds. 'Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers' uses rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter; 'Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room' employs regular tetrameter within six-line stanzas rhyming abba cc; 'Storm Warnings' relies on unrhymed, roughly iambic pentameter across seven-line stanzas; and 'Living in Sin' is structured as unrhymed blank verse in a single sustained stanza. These neat, well-mannered forms are not just exercises in convention. Rich uses formal containment ironically to mirror the restrictive domestic environments, patriarchal expectations, and insulated class privilege she critiques.

Transitional Period (1960s): Stepping onto the Listing Deck

In Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), represented by 'The Roofwalker', Rich's verse begins to loosen. Line lengths vary, syntax is broken by dashes, and traditional metres give way to expressive rhythms. The poet questions the conventional lives women were expected to build, aligning herself with figures working exposed in the dark.

Late Radical Period (Late 1960s–1970s): Open Free Verse and Re-Vision

In The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973), and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), Rich fully developed an open, unrhymed free verse. She concluded that inherited poetic forms were complicit in maintaining patriarchal authority. In her essay 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision', Rich defined re-vision as "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction"—a necessity for women whose realities had been omitted from the historical record.

Early Formal Control: Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room, and Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Written in three AABB rhyming quatrains, the poem sets up a striking contrast between needlework and the woman creating it. Jennifer stitches vibrant beasts that "prance across a screen", calling them "Bright topaz denizens of a world of green". They "do not fear the men beneath the tree" and "pace in sleek chivalric certainty". Their untamed grace exposes Jennifer's physical and psychological oppression: her "fingers fluttering through her wool / Find even the ivory needle hard to pull".

The root of her exhaustion is captured in an everyday domestic object: "The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand". By definition a gold band is light, so the adjective "massive" highlights the crushing emotional burden of patriarchal marriage. Rich ends on a bleak, unambiguous note: even in death, Jennifer's "terrified hands will lie / Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by". Jennifer achieves no personal liberation; the triumph belongs strictly to her art, as the tigers "Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid".

Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

Rich adopts the persona of an aristocratic gentleman observing political unrest from his parlour. The poem is written in steady tetrameter across six-line stanzas rhyming abba cc. This enclosed shape mirrors the uncle's obsession with decorum: the abba quatrain seals itself off from the street, and each stanza is locked down with a couplet, as though the speaker were bolting a door.

His polished diction ("Let us consider, none the less") fails to hide his terror. He reduces the protestors outside to a sullen "mob" who have "held and fingered stones", while his anxiety centres entirely on delicate possessions: "Certain frailties of glass / Which, it cannot be denied, / Lead in times like these to fear / For crystal vase and chandelier". Rich's dramatic monologue turns ironic in the closing lines: "We stand between the dead glass-blowers / And murmurings of missile throwers". The uncle believes his class is defending culture, but the word "dead" confirms his world is an obsolete relic, while "between" reveals he is cornered between a past that has perished and an incoming social upheaval.

Storm Warnings

'Storm Warnings' is written in unrhymed lines of roughly iambic pentameter, arranged in four seven-line stanzas that each conclude with a shortened line—a deliberate, rigid shape that enacts the speaker's effort to hold chaos at bay. The poem opens with a falling barometer: "The glass has been falling all the afternoon", while the speaker, "knowing better than the instrument / What winds are walking overhead", paces "from window to closed window".

At the close of the second stanza, the outer weather turns explicitly psychological: "Weather abroad / And weather in the heart alike come on / Regardless of prediction". The third stanza articulates the core insight: "Between foreseeing and averting change / Lies all the mastery of elements / Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter... the wind will rise, / We can only close the shutters". In the final stanza, the speaker draws curtains and sets "a match to candles sheathed in glass / Against the keyhole draught", calling this "our sole defense against the season; / These are the things that we have learned to do / Who live in troubled regions". The shift to the plural "we" broadens a private emotional storm into a shared social condition.

Domestic Collapse and Communication Breakdown: Living in Sin and Trying to Talk with a Man

Living in Sin

Written in twenty-six lines of unrhymed blank verse contained within a single stanza, 'Living in Sin' traces the deflation of a romantic, bohemian fantasy. An unmarried woman imagined an effortless artistic retreat: "She had thought the studio would keep itself; / no dust upon the furniture of love", picturing "a piano with a Persian shawl" and a "picturesque amusing mouse".

Harsh morning light destroys the illusion, coldly delineating "the scraps / of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles". The adjective "sepulchral" injects the chill of a tomb into the domestic quarters. Meanwhile, the stairs "writhe / under the milkman’s tramp" and a beetle gazes from the saucers as an "envoy from some village in the moldings". Her male partner remains utterly detached: he yawns, sounds "a dozen notes upon the keyboard", declares the piano "out of tune", shrugs at the mirror, and heads out for cigarettes. The woman is left behind, "jeered by the minor demons" of household chores. The poem concludes with a recurring cycle: by evening she is "back in love again", yet waking through the night to feel morning arrive "like a relentless milkman up the stairs".

Trying to Talk with a Man

Set against the Nevada desert testing grounds where the US military detonates atomic weapons, the poem uses the barren landscape of "dull green succulents" and "condemned scenery" as an extended metaphor for a dying relationship. The opening line—"Out in this desert we are testing bombs"—carries dual weight: the state tests weapons of mass destruction, while the husband and wife test the limits of their union.

Their silence is not new; it "came with us and is familiar", and past conversations were simply desperate efforts to "blot it out". Rich directly links male power with violence: the husband's "dry heat feels like power", leaving the speaker "more helpless with you than without you". He evades emotional honesty by focusing on practical details, pacing the floor and "talking of the danger / as if it were not ourselves". When she looks into his eyes, she sees "stars of a different magnitude / they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT". Rich exposes how intimate emotional withdrawal and global militarism spring from the same root: a refusal to acknowledge vulnerability.

Risk, Archaeology and Re-Vision: The Roofwalker and Diving Into the Wreck

The Roofwalker

Dedicated "For Denise Levertov", 'The Roofwalker' charts the crisis of leaving behind an externally imposed life. Watching builders standing still on a half-finished roof at nightfall—"It is / quiet after the hammers, / the pulleys hang slack"—the speaker identifies with their precarity. They look "exposed, larger than life, / and due to break my neck". Through sustained shipwreck imagery, the unfinished roof becomes a "listing deck" beneath a "wave / of darkness", while the workers resemble "shadows / on a burning deck".

The speaker admits that her conventional domestic path was never a conscious decision: "A life I didn’t choose / chose me". She questions the effort spent maintaining an unfulfilling existence: "Was it worth while to lay-- / with infinite exertion-- / a roof I can’t live under?" To claim authentic selfhood, she must discard unsuitable tools and risk exposure as "a naked man fleeing / across the roofs". The poem closes by doubling the speaker: one self runs exposed in the dark, while another sits safely "in the lamplight / against the cream wallpaper / reading--not with indifference".

Diving Into the Wreck

In 'Diving Into the Wreck', Rich provides her central allegory of historical excavation. A solitary diver descends into the ocean to explore a submerged shipwreck. Having first read the 'book of myths' — the male-authored cultural record that has distorted or omitted female experience — she descends 'here alone' with only a camera and a knife, leaving the received story behind in order to reach the wreck itself.

Crawling "like an insect down the ladder", she discovers that "the sea is not a question of power"; survival demands yielding to the element. Her objective is explicit: "I came to explore the wreck", demanding "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth". Inside the hull, she uncovers both "the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail". Crucially, the diver's gender remains fluid: she becomes both the "mermaid whose dark hair / streams black" and "the merman in his armored body", announcing "I am she: I am he". Rich deliberately dissolves rigid gender boundaries, ending at the "book of myths / in which our names do not appear" to demand that erased lives be recovered.

Linguistic Oppression, Sacrifice, and Endurance: Our Whole Life, Power, and From a Survivor

Our Whole Life

This poem tackles how language can enforce social oppression. Rich argues that everyday human experience is constantly mediated: "Our whole life a translation / the permissible fibs". Compromises curdle into "a knot of lies / eating at itself to get undone". Rich introduces an accessible image of linguistic inadequacy—"Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts"—before moving to violent imagery to show how genuine meanings are destroyed: "meanings burnt-off like paint / under the blowtorch" when forced into "the oppressor’s language".

Rich roots this abstract problem in the physical body through "the Algerian / who walked from his village, burning / his whole body a cloud of pain / and there are no words for this / except himself". Extreme suffering cannot be translated into the terms of the oppressor; only the wounded body can bear honest witness.

Power

'Power' explores how female achievement is entangled with bodily sacrifice through the life of Marie Curie. The poem begins with an archaeological image: an earth-mover uncovers an amber-tinted medicine bottle from "a crumbling flank of earth", a hundred-year-old patent cure "for fever or melancholy", introducing the idea of excavating history.

Rich then details Curie's physical decline from radiation sickness: suffering from cataracts and the "cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends", she was "bombarded for years by the element / she had purified". The verb "bombarded" turns radiation into an assault. The final lines fracture across the page, visually enacting physical breakdown: she died "denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power". Curie's scientific authority and her fatal bodily damage came from the very same element.

From a Survivor

Addressed to Rich's deceased husband, 'From a Survivor' (written in 1972 and published in Diving into the Wreck) offers an unsentimental elegy on grief, memory, and renewal. Rich remembers their marriage without nostalgia as "the ordinary pact of men & women in those days", deflating youthful vanity: "Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special".

Time and survival bring complete clarity. Her late husband's body is "no longer the body of a god / or anything with power over my life", and she understands "what it could and could not do". Though she mourns a partner now "wastefully dead" who failed to make the transformative "leap" they discussed too late, the speaker continues forward. True renewal is achieved "not as a leap / but a succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next".

Comparative Synthesis: Themes, Methods, and Poem Pairings

A high-scoring essay builds comparative links between poems rather than dealing with each text in isolation. Use this synthesis table to pair poems in your essay plans:

Essential Quotation Bank

Commit four to five short, exact phrases to memory for each poem. The marked phrases are primary evidence for exam essays:

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

• Primary: "Bright topaz denizens of a world of green"
• Primary: "The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band"
• "fingers fluttering through her wool"
• "ivory needle hard to pull"
• "Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by"
• "prancing, proud and unafraid"

Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

• Primary: "Certain frailties of glass"
• Primary: "We stand between the dead glass-blowers / And murmurings of missile throwers"
• "mob of late / Standing sullen in the square"
• "crystal vase and chandelier"
• "in the keeping of our kind"

Storm Warnings

• Primary: "Weather abroad / And weather in the heart alike come on"
• Primary: "Between foreseeing and averting change / Lies all the mastery of elements"
• "The glass has been falling all the afternoon"
• "winds are walking overhead"
• "our sole defense against the season"
• "Who live in troubled regions"

Living in Sin

• Primary: "no dust upon the furniture of love"
• Primary: "like a relentless milkman up the stairs"
• "scraps / of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles"
• "sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, / declared it out of tune"
• "jeered by the minor demons"

The Roofwalker

• Primary: "A life I didn’t choose / chose me"
• Primary: "a roof I can’t live under"
• "quiet after the hammers, / the pulleys hang slack"
• "listing deck"
• "a naked man fleeing / across the roofs"
• "reading--not with indifference"

Our Whole Life

• Primary: "Our whole life a translation / the permissible fibs"
• Primary: "rendered into the oppressor’s language"
• "knot of lies / eating at itself to get undone"
• "Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts"
• "meanings burnt-off like paint / under the blowtorch"
• "his whole body a cloud of pain"

Trying to Talk with a Man

• Primary: "Out in this desert we are testing bombs"
• Primary: "reflect lights that spell out: EXIT"
• "condemned scenery"
• "talking of the danger / as if it were not ourselves"
• "dry heat feels like power"
• "more helpless with you than without you"

Diving Into the Wreck

• Primary: "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth"
• Primary: "book of myths / in which our names do not appear"
• "I came to explore the wreck"
• "the sea is not a question of power"
• "I am she: I am he"
• "damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail"

Power

• Primary: "earth-deposits of our history"
• Primary: "her wounds came from the same source as her power"
• "one bottle amber perfect"
• "cure for fever or melancholy"
• "bombarded for years by the element / she had purified"
• "cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends"

From a Survivor

• Primary: "the ordinary pact of men & women in those days"
• Primary: "a succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next"
• "Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special"
• "no longer the body of a god / or anything with power over my life"
• "wastefully dead"

Key terms

Aesthetic Language

Language chosen for its sensory, imaginative, and musical qualities—such as metre, imagery, rhythm, and sound patterning—to create artistic meaning beyond literal communication.

Dramatic Monologue

A poetic form where an imagined persona speaks to a silent auditor, inadvertently exposing their personal prejudices, moral flaws, or anxieties, as in 'Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room'.

Extended Metaphor

A sustained comparison developed across an entire poem, such as deep-sea exploration in 'Diving Into the Wreck' or the nuclear proving grounds in 'Trying to Talk with a Man'.

Free Verse

Poetry that moves away from set metres and consistent rhyme schemes, relying instead on speech rhythms, variable line breaks, and typographic placement.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence across a line break without terminal punctuation, generating momentum, anxiety, or emotional hesitation.

Tetrameter

A poetic line of four metrical beats. In 'Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room', tetrameter reinforces the speaker's rigid concern with surface composure.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part represents the whole, such as Aunt Jennifer’s 'terrified hands' standing for her entire subjugated person.

Paradox

A statement that seems contradictory on the surface but reveals a deeper truth, such as Marie Curie's wounds springing 'from the same source as her power'.

Re-Vision

Rich's concept of looking back into history and literature with fresh critical insight to uncover experiences omitted by male-authored narratives.

Androgyny

The blending of female and male identities, explored in 'Diving Into the Wreck' ('I am she: I am he') to challenge rigid gender divisions.

Persona

A theatrical mask or created character through which a poet speaks, separate from the author's own autobiographical voice.

PCLM Marking Criteria

The four criteria applied by Leaving Certificate examiners: Clarity of Purpose (30%), Coherence of Delivery (30%), Efficiency of Language Use (30%), and Accuracy of Mechanics (10%).