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  • Essay / Analysis of Adrienne Rich's "Song"

    Adrienne Rich's "Song" plays an uncomfortably intimate melody concerning a woman's feelings of inescapable loneliness. Adrienne asserts the tortured song of this woman's soul so beautifully, teasing the reader from the start with passivity, then artfully slips into prose so beautiful that the reader cannot help but be intoxicated, drawn in like a lover . But like a midnight seductress, Rich gently seduces to leave her lover mystified and bewitched, but broken by the silence that inhabits him. comes at the end of the song. Through “Song,” Rich lets the reader try it, lets the reader think that we have put ourselves in his shoes, to leave us as isolated as we seemed to think. The sweet and sad melody of “Song”. "Simply put, it's that even though people think we can penetrate each other, we're still left to our own devices and often can't even trust our song. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Rich begins the poem with “You wonder if I’m alone,” already creating a disparity between “you,” the reader, and “Me”, the poet These two characters are separate, different from each other, the line in the sand is drawn even more by a simple one. capital letter, immediately drawing the eye to the two words that stand apart from the others By immediately addressing his reader, Rich has succeeded in appealing to the reader's greatest interest, namely himself, and can now be content. to have a captive audience By continuing with “OK, so yes, I am alone”, the reader has already won a small victory by making this poet, this stranger, admit and concede what we are now wondering. She continues, "like a plane travels solitary and level/on its radio beam", again emphasizing its loneliness by repeating the word, drumming it in our minds, but also taking us out of the world of you and me and into us placing high above the earth in a solitary plane riding on an invisible beam, so dense that it overtakes our eye, just as she overtakes us. the blue-roped walkways/of an airfield on the ocean.” Once again, Rich reiterates the disparity, first with the “You” and the “I,” now with the heights of the earth and the depths. of the sea. Both places evoke feelings of loneliness as both are displaced from a simple land, one reaching the heights of the heavens and the other surrounded by "water, water everywhere." To begin the second stanza, Rich separates the reader from herself again, but this time with more conviction, stating "You want to ask, am I alone telling us what we want, knowing it almost shyly?" , but the whip shakes us out of our calm with “Well, of course,” as if the desire were ridiculous. With the phrase “lonely/as a woman driving across the country,” she again plays on the notions we already have, knowing that we will naturally make a woman driving alone more vulnerable, more fragile than we would make driving a strong and updated man. No, Rich knows as well as a state highway officer that a woman driving alone seems to scream lost, alone, vulnerable, searching in a way a solo driver never will. The rich isolations now divide us further with time and space “day by day, leaving behind us/mile by mile/.” Thoughts become as segmented and separated as the reader and the poet, the distance between them is longer than the.