“The Stranger” by Adrienne Rich

 

Rich, Adrienne, et al. Collected Poems: 1950-2012. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.

 

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart

of the street to the river

walking the rivers of the avenues

feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

watching the lights turn on in the towers

walking as I’ve walked before

like a man, like a woman, in the city

my visionary anger cleansing my sight

and the detailed perceptions of mercy

flowering from that anger

 

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language

if they ask me my identity

what can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

in your dead language

the lost noun, the verb surviving

only in the infinitive

the letters of my name are written under the lids

of the newborn child

 

This poem, by Adrienne Rich, identifies the poet herself as “the androgyne,” describing herself as “like a man, like a woman.” This claim, along with the flowery language of the poem, pulls Rich out of the realm of the real and into the realm of the symbolic. However, as a consequence, this relegates androgyny into the realm of the artistic.

Rich enjoyed toying around with the figure of the androgyne, but this is the clearest statement of who the androgyne actually is. The language is cryptic, and statements like “the lost noun, the verb surviving / only in the infinitive” seem to mean less than they do evoke a certain incomprehensibility; in other words, they seem to be not a clue to the meaning of Rich’s androgyne, but rather confuse the reader in the way that Rich believes the androgyne would.

I find this rather uncomfortable. Rich describes the androgyne as something that can’t truly be understood in binary language (“the living mind you fail to describe / in your dead language”) but at the same time the fact that she writes this poetry implies that on some deep level she does understand the androgyne. I dislike this because it appropriates the image of the androgyne from a still-binary perspective, as Rich identified as a woman. Can androgyny be written in our dead language? Possibly more importantly, can it be written by a man or a woman?