living in sin

Adrienne Rich’s poem, Living in Sin, tells us that there is a couple living together. The poem illustrates the way the woman thought her studio would look like, “she had thought the studio would keep itself” (1) and the way it actually looks, torn apart. The poem also talks about how “a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging” (5-7). Here we see that a cat did get up at the man’s urging and we can depict that the man has now entered into the poem. There is an unlikely feeling between the man and the cat, and this poem tells us how the woman fantasizes what it would be like to live with her partner, but as you can tell it is not real.

The form of the poem is a free verse, which means that there is no regular rhythm or a rhyme scheme. The fact that there is no rhyming in the poem tells us that the couple is not getting along in the relationship. For instance, in the first two lines the speaker says, “She had thought the studio would keep itself, no dust upon the furniture of love” (1-2). The word “had thought” tells us that the woman imagined that the relationship would be something she wanted, but it is not. The word studio tells us where the couple might be living and the phrase “furniture of love” follows along with the word studio. These lines could tell us that the studio is where they are intimate, but it actually tells us that the word studio infers to their relationship. Therefore, the speaker tells us she had thought the relationship would keep itself, which means she expected the relationship to be perfect, so that she and her partner would not put in extra work into it.

The meter of the poem contains at least ten syllables in some lines, others have eleven syllables, and the rest is fewer. Al...

... middle of paper ...

...n be a never-ending cycle because even though she was cleaning up one thing, another mess is staring with the coffee spilling all over the stove.

The poem ends with the nighttime hiding the reality the woman sees in her day-to-day relationship. During the night, the woman can forget about all the wrongdoing in her relationship and go back to reliving her dream of her perfect relationship. The way that the speaker suggested earlier in the poem that the daylight, the milkman, and the beetle’s eyes seem to illustrate the way that they witness how the woman actually lives, is in fact the reality of her life repeating itself every morning. The speaker uses a simile comparing the daylight to the milkman. At night, the woman falls in love with her fantasy, but her sleep interrupts her expectations of her morning daylight that will come and start the cycle all over again.