“Song” by Adrienne Rich plays an intimate and uncomfortable melody concerning a woman's feelings of inevitable loneliness. Adrienne states the tortured song of this woman's soul so beautifully, teasing the reader from the start with passivity, and then slyly slips into prose so lovely that the reader can't help but be intoxicated, drawn in like a lover. But like a midnight seductress, Rich gently seduces only to leave her lover confused and enchanted, but destroyed by the silence that envelops him. comes at the end of the song. Through “Song” Rich lets the reader feel her, lets the reader think we have gotten under her skin, only to leave us as isolated as the sweet, sad melody of “Song seemed to be In a nutshell, as much as people may think that we can penetrate each other, we are always left alone to ourselves and often we can't even believe that the song of ourselves is enough. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Rich begins the poem with “You're wondering if I'm lonely” already creating a disparity between “you,” the reader, and “I,” the poet. These two characters are separate, alone; different from each other, the line is drawn in the sand. The distance between “you” and “I” is emphasized even more with simple capitalization, immediately drawing attention to both words moving away from the others. By immediately addressing her reader, Rich has managed to appeal to the reader's greatest interest, himself, and can now be content with having a captive audience. By continuing with “OK, so yes, I feel alone,” the reader has already achieved a small victory by getting this poet, this stranger, to admit and concede what we are now wondering about. lonely and level/on its radio beam” reemphasizing its loneliness by repeating the word, instilling it in our minds, but also taking us out of the world of you and me and placing us far, far above the earth, on a lonely plane traveling on an invisible beam, so dense that it is beyond our eye, just as it is beyond us. The lone plane is left “heading/over the Rocky Mountains/towards the blue corridors/of an oceanside airport.” Once again, Rich reiterates the disparity, first with “Thou” and “I,” now with the heights of the earth and the depths of the sea. Both places evoke feelings of loneliness as both are moved from a simple land, one reaches to the heights of the heavens and the other is surrounded by "water, water everywhere". To begin the second stanza, Rich again separates the reader from herself, but this time with more conviction, stating "Do you want to ask me, do I feel alone?" telling us what we want, knowing it almost shyly, but knocking us out of our composure with, “Well, of course,” as if the desire were ridiculous. With the phrase “alone/like a woman driving across the country,” it plays again on the notions we already have, knowing that we will naturally make a woman driving alone more vulnerable, more fragile than we would with a strong, self-actualized man driving . No, Rich knows as well as a highway patrolman that a woman driving alone seems to scream lost, alone, vulnerable, looking in a way that a lone male driver never will. Rich isolates who now divide us further with time and space into “day by day, leaving us behind/mile by mile/”. Thoughts become segmented and separate like those of the reader and the poet, the distance between them longer than time itself, wider than miles can measure, like the loneliness of the human heart, deeper than all the depths we have explored and.
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