Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:46:48.405Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Hermit's Scream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Adrienne Rich
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

He said I had this that I could love,

As one loves visible and responsive peace,

As one loves one's own being,

As one loves that which is the end

And must be loved, as one loves that

Of which one is a part as in a unity,

A unity that is the life one loves,

So that one lives all the lives that comprise it

As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Wallace Stevens, “Yellow Afternoon”

I am a failure then, as the kind of revolutionary Anne-Marion and her acquaintances were. (Though in fact she had heard of nothing revolutionary this group had done, since she left them ten summers ago. Anne-Marion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned.)

Alice Walker, Meridian (200–01)

I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”:

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1157 - 1164
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. “Chemin de Fer.” The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, 1980. 8.Google Scholar
Bok, Sissela. Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir. Reading: Addison, 1991.Google Scholar
Carruth, Hayden. Letter to the author. 6 Apr. 1992.Google Scholar
Deming, Barbara. Prisons That Could Not Hold: Prison Notes 1964–Seneca 1984. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1985.Google Scholar
Deming, Barbara. We Cannot Live without Our Lives. New York: Grossman-Viking, 1974.Google Scholar
Gardinier, Suzanne. “To Peace.” The New World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.Google Scholar
Gardinier, Suzanne. “Two Cities: On the Iliad.” Kenyon Review 14.2 (1992): 5–12.Google Scholar
Hall, Donald. Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets. New York: Ticknor, 1992.Google Scholar
Jordan, June. “For Michael Angelo Thompson.” Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems. New York: Random, 1977. 121–12.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. “Power.” The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978. 108–10.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing, 1984.Google Scholar
Merrill, James. Afterword. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. By David Kalstone. New York: Farrar, 1989. 251–25.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. “Yellow Afternoon.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1955. 236.Google Scholar
Walker, Alice. Meridian. New York: Pocket, 1976.Google Scholar