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In Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich, each poem helps us understand her life. We as the readers get a sneak peak at the struggles
she faces due to an almost doomed love mapping she has with another woman. The settings of her poems take place in Manhattan which she
refers to as the island of Manhattan many another (prenominal) times. There is a transitioning from beginning to end of this short assembling
of poems. Rich begins her collection with a jolly almost degenerate tone of passion and romance she shares with her lover.

The opening imagery strongly evokes the chaos of an unnamed city (I’d be interested to find out which city in particular): “screens flicker/with
pornography, with science-fiction vampires/victimized hirelings bending to the lash” (lines 1-3). There is not just the typical sleeze of the city
(pornography and poorly paid laborers) but a mystical element (the sci-fi vampires).

The dirt of the city is overpowering: “we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk/through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties/of our
own neighborhoods” (4-6). I’m not sure what to make of the “. . . ” that separates the parts of line 4- it seems to me to complicate the line as a
whole to the point where I’m not really sure what Rich is getting at, unless you put 4 and 5 together to say “as we walk/through the rainsoaked
garbage” and then the garbage seems to refer to tabloid newspapers. The “cruelties/of our own neighborhoods” are unclear, but the fact that
they are of the neighborhood and not distant show that they are close to home and very present.

From the image of rainsoaked newspapers, Rich moves into a call for action: “We need to grasp our lives inseparably/from those rancid
dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces” (7-8), further employing images of city life- “the red begonia perilously flashing/from a tenement
sill six stories high/or the long-legged young girls/playing ball/in the junior highschool playground” (9-12). Suddenly, femininity has been
introduced to the dismal gray of the city scene in the person of the young girls and with the red begonia. In my presentation, I made the case
that Rich uses the metaphor of a “red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths” in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” to symbolize herself
standing strong against the cemetery of male-dominated poetry and I think that same metaphor is used and applies here.

Rich concludes: “No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees/sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air/dappled with scars, still
exuberantly budding/our animal passion rooted in the city” (13-16). Who the specific “us” is is not explicit, but I assume (based on the rest of
the poem) that Rich is referring to women in general. The idea of women as trees, still flowering in spite of the toxic air- probably flowering
because of the driving “animal passion”- I think fits in very nicely with Rich’s ideas of herself as fighting for women against a resistant
patriarchal society, especially in the realm of literature.

“I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.” This straightforward first line of the poem includes a few things worth focusing on.
Rarely is the impact of a single word on a whole poem as visible as Rich's usage of “up” in this initial sentence. 'I wake in your bed' is a quick
moving way to begin the poem, almost hurried. This start also evokes a somewhat archaic tone, a voice that echoes long ago. “I wake up in
your bed,” might not seem much different, but the inclusion of the word “up” has positive connotations. These good vibes stretch to the next
sentence where “dreaming” represents a wonderful way to usher in a new day. But there was a separation of these two lovers “much earlier”
when “the alarm broke” them from sleep and “each other.” The lover of the poem's speaker has been at “a desk for hours,” working through
the early morning, while the speaker dreams love through the lens of poetry. She has been “writing for days” when their friend, the poet,
“comes into the room.” This room is a beautiful in a way that only a writer can appreciate: “drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere.”
This is pretty much the opposite of writer's block. Amongst this mess of productivity, there is a single poem that our speaker wants to show off.
She declares “it is the poem of my life.” And just when she is poised to give this lifework up to an audience, she freezes, or as Rich puts it “But
I hesitate, / and wake.” At this moment when a personal triumph is averted by fear, notice that Rich's speaker doesn't “wake up,” instead she
“wake(s).”

Awakened by kisses, our speaker tells her beloved “I dreamed you were a poem, / a poem I wanted to show someone...” For most poets, the
idea of displaying a poem in its early form is terrifying. We want to polish up the rough edges before unleashing it on the world. It's motivated
somewhat by ego; we don't want anyone to think less of us or our writing ability because of a poem released prematurely. And it's also
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motivated by a quest for perfection: the perfect word, the perfect voice, the perfect line break and form. We believe that if we pour all of
ourselves into writing and revising a poem that our sweat will earn a tiny taste of that perfection we're striving for. I'm not saying any of these
ideas are right, but to better understand the actions of Rich's speaker it is important to note these things. When she wants to show this poem
of her lover to someone it is an astounding tribute of love. From laughter she returns to dreams, but now that she has confronted the truth of
her feelings she can elucidate them further. She has “the desire to show you (her lover) to everyone I love, / to move openly together / in the
pull of gravity.” The weight that accompanies gravity “is not simple,” as Rich's speaker acknowledges, but she commits to this undertaking. It's
a commitment built by love, an emotion as natural as “the feathered grass” and “the upbreathing air.”

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“Lifting Belly” by Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” present complicated examples of poetry by women writers.
Stein’s “Lifting Belly” is infamous for its unclear and deceptive illustration of lesbian love-making. Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” are a
series of twenty-one poems in free verse that are very similar to traditional Petrarchan sonnet form, but adhere much less to the strict form of
the sonnet. Stylistically, these two works are incredibly different. Stein’s words resemble a stream of consciousness that goes on for pages
and pages that only indicate the subject through suggestion and evocation of feeling. Rich’s words are a clearly coherent series of poems that
paint a realistic image of a woman’s love for another woman. The “Love Poems” and “Lifting Belly” represent a lesbian position. Rich and Stein
both have emotional, physical, and intellectual relationships with women. Rich’s “Love Poems” were written while she was in a very passionate
relationship with another woman, and Stein’s long-term relationship with Alice B. Toklas has become a historical presence in the world of
lesbianism.
Stein was not a political woman, but her work often gets put into a canon of lesbian work. It gets lumped in with the supposedly “political” or
“feminist” poetry because she was emotionally, physically, and intellectually involved with another woman. Adrienne Rich, however, was

adamantly political. The collection that her “Twenty-One Love Poems” is published in is called The Dream of a Common Language. This
is the first true sign of her 2nd wave feminist status. The Dream of a Common Language: presumably the dream that all “women” could use a
common language. This is one of the frequently contested issues of radical feminism. The idea that all women could band together under a
universal feminism has been hotly debated in contemporary feminist circles. Universal feminism assumes that women want to lay down their
social position, abandon their cultural distinctiveness, and that women can just all of a sudden reach across racial, ethnic, religious, socio-
economic, and other boundaries. It is a relatively condescending and privileged perspective that is typically only wielded by predominantly
upper middle-class, white women. In other words, these are the only women that are able to look down from their cultural pedestal and
presume that black women, poor women, and lesbians want to join them in their the struggle against the patriarchy.
The idea of a universal feminism also glosses over and over-simplifies the term “woman.” What it means to be “woman” is indefinitely variable
from social location to social location. “Woman” is also problematic because of the gendered connotations that linger in the societal
expectations for “women.” In other words, woman is an exclusionary term for many and reinforces a binary system of gender: it becomes
“man” vs. “woman.”