“My heart doesn't ache. Sometimes though, it rages."

Listen to the poem

On March 22nd, 1989 Adrienne Rich reads out a poem called “One Life” to an audience full of poetry students, teachers, and avid listeners packed into the Poetry Center—a room too small to seat every attendee—and proceeds to set the world straight on the cost of womanhood. 

Her former husband, Alfred Haskell Conrad had taken his life nearly twenty years before and her angry, exploratory feminist poetry collection Diving into the Wreck was published four years later, winning her the National Book Award and making her a literary icon. Her three boys were grown and enough time had passed for this reluctant caregiver, wife, and mother to tally up the checks and balances of her domestic life.

In the VOCA recording of this obscure poem which was part of her Time's Power poetry collection published just a year before, Rich recites her own words with a casualness that belies the deep implications lying just beneath the surface. It is among the last poems she recites that day at the Poetry Center and her voice bristles and pierces through the recording as the poem unfurls its talons to sink its teeth into what has been the defining dilemma for womankind since time immemorial. 

The title of the poem appears ironic at first glance, for Rich is describing “One Life” after all—but women, overextending themselves as they have been raised to do, live several lives within that one life according to the poet. "It was terrible and good... I had four lives at least," she contends, dividing up her life (as many women do) into different eras: her carefree days as a child, her youth "with the girls... jitterbugging together," her marriage and time as a wife, and, finally, her role as a mother.  

Walking among cliffs with the aid of a walker, the silver-haired speaker in her poem is at first unable to offer a clear verdict on her life as the "bodily joys, much pain" and the laughter and the grief are "too fixed" to come to a definitive conclusion. She is, however, weighed down by "all the fixed declarations of baggage" that she's carried half-heartedly all these years.

"I should be dead and I'm alive,
don't ask me how."

The most powerful line of the poem introduces us mid-poem to the true state of her being with the cold, heartbreaking statement: "I should be dead and I'm alive, don't ask me how." It's a line that speaks volumes not only to the growing pains of every adult, but to the particular and very specific pain of being a woman who's taken on the burdens of being a caregiver to a partner, children, and, by extension, the world at large. As a 40-something single woman, it's a line that deeply resonates with my own estimation of my survival through the years. No, I am nobody's wife and I'm nobody's mother—but perhaps being alive for several decades in the body of a woman is enough to give me permission to throw my hat in this particular ring and say, “Me too.” 

Rich does not shy away from the reason why her heart "rages" rather than aches when she considers that the lives of most women, whether it's the 1980s or 2020s, can be summed up as "a worker and a mother, a worker and a worker." A relentless employee paying her dues and earning her keep at work and at home without a pension, without a union or the possibility of parole from her assigned role. The disillusionment inherent in family life is palpable in the line about life as a mother and wife because despite our girlish dreams, "none of it just what you'd thought. None of it what it could have been, if we'd known." Rich almost asserts the act of reeling women into these roles as a kind of trick, a dishonest game—because she believes if women had any clue what they were signing up for, it could have all turned out so differently. 

Expressing a penchant for Vodka right after conceding "I don't eat like I should," she draws attention to the self-neglect that's a common side effect of the juggling act women are expected to pull off in squeezing four lives out of one. Vodka was perhaps the barbiturate of Rich's era, the drug of choice that women on their hands and knees in kitchens and living rooms had to consume throughout the day to maintain what Betty Friedan called "The Feminine Mystique"—that habitual and incessant need to serve and be the purveyor of culture and humility, all while living 'half a life’ next to her male counterpart. 

"We took what we could," Rich says, defiantly, because as women, we are capable of being our own oppressors just as competently as becoming our own liberators. Still, however, the rage remains, even if the heart refuses to ache for the lost years, for the missed opportunities and the assumed identities, none of which lived up to what was promised.

In the final lines, Rich speaks of reading about other lives in books her daughter brought home from school. Walking with the aid of the walker once more, perhaps the speaker's silver hair, old age, and infirmity have finally allowed her the freedom to take up space in the world and move about it unencumbered by familiar burdens.  Whatever liberty she has access to seems precious as she read of lives that were "worse and better than what I knew" in her daughter's books.

But the rage remains.

For Adrienne Rich, for me, and for all women across time and space—for what we lose in the becoming of what culture prescribes.

_____

Sidanthi Siriwardena is a freelance writer, blogger and copywriter with a passion for literature and film. A former journalist with a B.A. in Mass Communication, she divides her time between writing and caring for her numerous pets. You can read her latest book reviews at @medea.rants.books and other literary musings here.