A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Adrienne Rich’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” directly engages with the literary canon to forefront both the importance and the struggles of female authorship. Through its relationship with John Donne’s 1633 poem of the same name (See: Background), Rich’s poem presents the history of English literature as a history of female erasure. Rich converses with Donne’s poem by taking the perspective of Donne’s female addressee who, in the original poem, is forced to stay home while her husband travels. This female perspective allows Rich’s “Valediction” to explore the patriarchal structure of the Western literary canon and undo it from within.

Donne’s poetry employs extended metaphors called metaphysical conceits. These conceits are the defining quality of Metaphysical poets like Donne. In Donne’s “Valediction,” his speaker uses the two legs of a cartographers “compass” (Line 26) to represent the relationship between a traveling husband and a domestic wife. Donne’s speaker calls their wife’s soul “the fixed foot” (Line 27) of the compass which “makes no show / [t]o move” (Line 28) as the speaker wanders the world around them. Rich’s speaker begins her poem with the same “swirling” (Line 1) motion, which positions her speaker in the same position as Donne’s addressee. The “wants” (Line 1) that swirl within Rich’s speaker as they follow their interlocutor reflect the desire of Donne’s addressee to keep her husband home. These connections position Rich’s speaker in the subservient, female position occupied by Donne’s speaker’s wife at the end of his poem.

In both works, the figure of patriarchal power uses their command of language and rhetoric to reinforce their dominance. Rich presents Donne’s metaphysical conceit as “swirling” (Line 1) or intentionally confusing her speaker. The speaker’s statement that “grammar turned and attacked me” (Line 2) resonates with their previous mention of their interlocutor's “frozen lips” (Line 1) to suggest the conceit is a cold, aggressive use of language. Rich’s speaker presents Donne’s language as a way of asserting dominance through ambiguity. If all language becomes “a dialect called metaphor” (Line 12), as Rich’s speaker states, it fails to talk in anything but abstraction. Simple images like “hair, glacier, flashlight” (Line 13) “go unglossed” (Line 13) in this abstract language, and cannot be developed like traditional metaphors. The language of literary criticism (See: Themes), likewise, fails “to locate the pain” (Line 8) Rich’s speaker experiences.

Insofar as the literary language oppressing the speaker is a “dialect” (Line 12), it can only be spoken by a small group. This exclusionary nature of literature points toward the white, male ruling class that exercised their will over the Western world. Rich’s speaker reflects their own exclusion from the literary elite. Rather than participate in the history of poetic conceits and abstraction, Rich’s speaker hones in on concrete experiences such as “A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreathes” (Line 11) or “the poster in the bus” (Line 9). While these images could be read as further metaphors of male oppression, their mundane appearance resists close symbolic reading. The speaker offers the poster’s text, “my bleeding is under control” (Line 10) for interpretation instead of the posters themselves. Rich’s speaker understands what these things mean but refuses to make meanings abstract. They make this refusal explicit when they state that “these mountains have a meaning / but further than that I could not say” (Lines 16-17).

By resisting the traditional play of metaphor and ambiguity, Rich’s speaker actively develops a new form of poetry. Their desire to “do something very common” (Line 18) suggests an engagement with everyday experience through vernacular language. Meanwhile, their insistence to engage with these experiences “in my own way” (Line 18) emphasizes their individual agency and need for self-expression. These desires constitute part of the speaker’s “swirling wants” (Line 1) which are under attack at the beginning of the poem and are therefore unable to establish themselves.

Through a mode of expression without reliance on metaphor or conceits, Rich’s speaker creates a poetry that describes the world’s concrete details. Their focus on concrete facts democratizes poetic expression, allowing populations that cannot speak the critical “dialect” (Line 12) a voice. The speaker’s choice of imagery also reinforces their attention to including historically silenced voices. The “poster in the bus” (Line 9) and the “plastic wreaths” (Line 11) both suggest the speaker lives in a lower-class environment and struggles to afford either private transportation or real foliage. Yet, their use of such images in their response to Donne elevates this environment to new poetic heights.

By reimagining Donne’s poem and giving voice to his addressee, Rich’s “Valediction” creates a new space for female perspectives in the Western literary canon. The poem advocates and demonstrates a poetic mode that favors concrete details over obtuse and domineering metaphors. Despite the poem’s critique of literary criticism, Rich’s work provides its own critique of the literary canon and its patriarchal history. Rich’s “Valediction” does not deny the importance of poets like Donne but rather engages with them to demonstrate their limitations and to allow alternate perspectives.