リッチの第6詩集 The Will to Change --繰り返される旅立ち--

Abstract

In this report I discuss the four poems, "November 1968", "Planetarium", "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus" and "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning", from Adrienne Rich's sixth book, The Will to Change. This book consists of nineteen poems written from 1968 to 1970. Among several features of this book, I focus my attention on the subject of her deepened introspection. This introspective attitude of hers was obvious as early as 1966, in her book, Necessities of Life, in such poems as "Necessities of Life", "In the Woods" and "After Dark". She has more and more inclined to this attitude, which is also obvious in all the four poems I discuss in this report. Rich projected herself on Orion, a male God settled as a constellation in the sky, in a poem "Orion" in Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968. In "Planetarium" she projects herself on Caroline Herschel, the sister of a famous astronomer William Herschel, who helped William very much in his finding many comets. This means that she has taken a long step forward in her introspection, as she herself says: "at last the woman in the poem and the woman writing the poem become the same person". At the same time, she has become more conscious of her own role both as a woman and as a poet. She is trying "to translate pulsations into images", that means to speak for others what they cannot articulate though they want to utter eagerly. As the title of the book The Will to Change suggests, Rich places a high value on "change". Through her poems she advocates the necessity to have "the will to change" herself and others, therefore it may be said that many of the poems in the sixth book express "a new start".