A ‘wild patience’: magic and transformation in Integrity by Adrienne Rich

The ‘wild patience’ that opens this poem conjures an image of something held in both a delicate balance, and an impossible tension for the speaker, a woman at a certain stage of her life. Throughout the poem we find these, and other polarities, pulling against each other, yet yoked uncomfortably tight. It is ‘the quality of being complete’, that epigrammatic definition of integrity from Webster’s Dictionary that prefaces the poem, and forms its title, that invites a resolution in a world where neither wildness nor patience is enough. ‘An epigram’, said Seamus Heaney, ‘is like a tuning fork’, and perhaps Adrienne Rich shows us that this also makes it like a spell, casting a benevolent and unifying influence which, sounding through each line of the poem, is integral to its power.

A brief glance at the etymological dictionary adds another dimension. A quixotic word of many derivations, spell has evolved in one of its meanings from Old English spala, which came to mean a single worker's turn at work and finally a period spent in a job or occupation. Rich’s poem taps into that sense of spell as time spent, a necessary duration which is the prerequisite of so many transformational journeys with their attendant myths, their herculean tasks, the landscapes and cycles of time that must be traversed, always without loss of vision or purpose. A wild patience, she says, ‘has carried me this far’. But her subject is also motherhood, which she might be said to envision as a single worker’s turn at work, a period spent in a job or occupation, caught always in a contradiction with the fact that, as she said, ‘for me, poetry was where I lived as no one’s mother, where I existed as myself.’1

The mythic structure of the poem plays with the resolution of seven cycles of seven years found in so many traditions. That forty-ninth year, the jubilee, embodies ideas of duration and culmination, and often it is followed by a year of rest. For the woman, retracing her way by boat to a cabin, there seem to be many things at stake on a journey ‘this far north’ in light ‘critical’, in her ‘forty-ninth year’, with light and time hanging in the balance. But it also contains within itself a sense of mystery, as Rich conjures

…this

long-dreamed, involuntary landing

on the arm of an inland sea.

The glitter of the shoal

depleting into shadow…

Fulfilling a cycle, or circle, the culmination inevitably involves a return: made vividly present in colours more true, the recognized image of ‘the stand of pines/violet-black really’, not green as ‘in the old postcard’, achieves a newly concrete existence. So too does the narrative of a life lived, articulated in the long-forgotten detail of ‘the chart nailed to the wallboards/the icy kettle squatting on the burner’ of the cabin.

Redundant, and abandoned, the chart, as full of contradiction as that ‘icy kettle’, has offered no real map to navigate a life filled with frustration. For Rich the constraining force is that which is ‘overlaid’ on women’s lives ‘by societal and traditional circumstance’,2 particularly in relation to motherhood. Not ‘the fact of motherhood’, she writes in Of Woman Born, first published in 1976, two years before ‘Integrity’, but ‘the patriarchal institution of motherhood’, by which, beyond the care of children, a woman is ‘restricted from acting on anything except inert materials like dust and food’.3 Her poem revises this narrative, elevating the role of hands which have ‘worked the vacuum aspirator’, and ‘emptied that kettle one last time’. Domestic tasks are redeemed poetically through incantation into rituals, where the anaphora of ‘And I have’ both bears witness to, and enlarges, the quotidian detail in stanzas which give shape to, and reshape, a whole life.

It is here we might find the poem connecting us to yet other kind of spell, those incantations of language which energise and are, finally, instrumental in that process of transformation. In her essay Rich tells us that ‘as a young mother I remember feeling guilt that my explosions of anger were a bad example for my children…a defect of character, having nothing to do with what happens in the world outside one’s flaming skin.’4 But the anger of frustrated creative and intellectual impulses, which appears in the poem as a sense of being ‘scalded’ by the burning sun, with its association of a dominant power, also meets a contradictory tenderness, captured most powerfully in the image of hands which have ‘caught the baby leaping/from between trembling legs’. Embodying both the exhilaration and exhaustion of a life demanding unconditional ‘relation to others rather than the creation of self’,5 the language of ‘leaping’ and ‘trembling’ explodes with a physicality both endearing and relentless. But this physicality also yokes the speaker to the uneasy violence of ‘the hand that slammed and locked’ the cabin door.

Though scalded themselves, hands perform the domestic acts by which life is defined, and refined. They have ‘stroked the sweated temples’ of others, in repetitive movements mirrored in the alliteration and assonance of Rich’s language. They have ‘stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis/back on the trellis’, tenderly restoring it ‘for no one’s sake except its own’. Finally, they are even ‘salved’ by their own power of healing, in the discovery that, as Rich observes in another poem, ‘her wounds came from the same source as her power’.6 The ‘wild patience’ is now both fuel and spell, its ‘unspoken anger’ an energy compacted by time and resistance to celebrate that it is hands and words which express the rhythms of life.

That sense of spell as duration is also complete: ‘I have’, she says, earlier in the poem as she steers the boat in, ‘nothing but myself to go by; nothing/…except what my hands can hold’. Everything else has been stripped away, leaving only ‘the realm of pure necessity’, and her ‘selves’, a settling in with the fact of this duality: ‘After so long, this answer.’ It is the poetic power of the spider to weave out of herself ‘anywhere - even from a broken web’ which provides the metaphor for the final transformation, in which the polarities of anger and tenderness can become ‘angels’, attendant energies7 which, no longer held in opposition to each other, suggest a transcendence which can also keep its feet firmly on the ground. It is this poetic ability to create lines ‘where inner and outer reality fuse into a kind of living fabric’ which, John Ashbery observed, make Rich ‘a metaphysical poet’.8 Like the spider always remaking, the poet weaves together the repetitions and contradictions, spell-like, retrieving and re-visioning: in ‘Integrity’, the mended ‘broken web’ of the spider recalls the ‘unbroken condition’ of Webster’s definition. The task is complete, and, in a trick of language, salvation waits inside ‘salve’.

Lesley Sharpe

1 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago 1977), p.31.

2 Ibid. pp. 32-8.

3 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Virago, 1977), pp.32-8.

4 Ibid. p. 46.

5 Ibid. p. 42.

6 ‘Power’, Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions) (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 73.

7 Rich spoke elsewhere of the attendant daimons which forced as it were, a sort of destiny or journey, energies which expressed themselves through one, and could not be ignored: ‘…the term demon is more useful than angel because it conveys more of a sense which involves Rich. Demon derives from the Greek daimon: a divine power, fate or god; in other words, some force capable of overwhelming a person – not necessarily to evil…a conflict that could result in the reshaping of the psyche along the lines of the self-attention the demon demands’. Claire Keyes, ‘The Angels Chiding’, in Reading Adrienne Rich, Reviews and Revisions, 1951-81, ed. by Jane Roberta Cooper (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 30.

8John Ashbery, ‘Tradition and Talent’, in Reading Adrienne Rich, Reviews and Revisions, 1951-81, ed. by Jane Roberta Cooper (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 217.