A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Adrienne Rich is one of the most influential poets and feminist thinkers of post-war American literature. Rich’s earliest poetry, including the 1951 collection A Change of World followed traditional poetic forms. Her later poetry, like that of many feminist poets of the 1960s and 1970s such as Audre Lorde, became more experimental. Rich’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” first collected in Rich’s Will to Change, was published in 1970, in the middle of this period.

Rich’s “Valediction” is emblematic of her larger career and concerns. The poem alludes to John Donne’s 1633 poem of the same name. The speaker of Donne’s canonical work uses literary and rhetorical devices to justify his departure from his wife. Rich’s poem inverts many of Donne’s conceits in a modernized reframing of the 1633 poem. Rich’s “Valediction” breaks down the rhetorical and literary devices of Donne’s speaker. In doing so, Rich draws attention to the aggression inherit in these devices and in the literary canon that relies on them.

Poet Biography

Adrienne Rich was born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rich’s father, Arnold Rice Rich, served as chairman of pathology at John Hopkins Medical School. Many of Rich’s earliest poetic influences came from her father’s library, and included 19th-century authors like William Blake and John Keats. Rich’s father encouraged her to read and write poetry from a young age with the hopes of turning her into a prodigy. Rich was home schooled until the fourth grade, when she entered public education.

Rich’s family later enrolled her in Roland Park Country School, a traditional all-girls preparatory school. After graduation, Rich attended Radcliffe College and was surprised to find that the women’s college did not employ female instructors. In 1950, poet W.H. Auden awarded Rich the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her then-unpublished A Change of Worlds. The next year, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford University but spent most of her time traveling Italy instead.

Rich married Harvard economics professor Alfred Haskell Conrad in 1953 and the two settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rich published her second collection, The Diamond Cutters, in 1955. In the early 1960s, Rich received a number of awards for her poetry, including a second Guggenheim Fellowship. Rich’s poetry grew more political during the 1960s. In 1966, Rich and her family moved to New York, where she became involved in social activism. She published three volumes of poetry during this period of activity, including 1971’s The Will to Change, where “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” first appears.

Rich and Conrad separated in 1970, allowing Rich to explore her sexuality. In 1976, she began a committed relationship with Jamaican novelist Michelle Cliff. Rich wrote extensively on lesbian politics during the late 1970s and produced a number of groundbreaking essays on the topic. Ideas and themes that Rich developed during this period permeate her later work. Rich taught at various universities between 1967 and 1987, when she retried to focus on writing and activism. The Clinton administration awarded Rich the National Medal of Arts in 1997. Rich declined the award in protest of prospective changes to National Endowment for the Arts funding.

Rich died March 27, 2012 from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Her last collection of new poetry, Tonight, no Poetry Will Serve, was published in 2011.

Poem Text

Rich, Adrienne “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” 1970. Fu Jen University.

Summary

“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” begins by distinguishing between the speaker’s “swirling wants” (Line 1) and an unknown interlocutor’s “frozen lips” (Line 1). The speaker then explores the act of writing itself, presenting the idea of violent grammar and “[t]hemes, written under duress” (Line 3). The second stanza builds on the violence of the first, and the speaker explains that they were given “a drug that slowed the healing of wounds” (Line 5).

In the third stanza, the speaker talks directly to the unknown interlocutor. They want the interlocutor to see “the experience of repetition as death” (Line 7) and “the failure of criticism to locate the pain” (Line 8). The speaker then refers to an advertisement they see on the bus for another drug.

The poem’s fifth stanza opens with abstruse literary jargon. The speaker claims that “the language is a dialect called metaphor” (Line 12) before exploring the nature of poetic images. The speaker then plays with the relationship between space and time, saying “when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time” (Line 14). The poem ends with the speaker’s insistence “[t]o do something very common, in my own way” (Line 18).