Poems and Problems

Adrienne Rich's poem brought to mind one of my favorite poems, called "The Trouble with 'In'" by Heather McHugh. Similar to Rich, McHugh plays with language and the way in which women are subject to the male gaze and the power men exert over women through their perceptions of them. So here's the poem:


The Trouble with "In"

In English, we're in trouble.
Love's a place
we fall into, so
sooner or later they ask

How deep? Time's a measure
of extent, so sooner or later
they ask How long? We keep
some comforters inside a box,
the heart inside a chest,

but still it's there the trouble with the dark
accumulates the most. The end of life
is said to be
a boat to a tropic,
good or bad. The suitor wants
to size up what he's getting into, so her gets
her measurements. But how much

is enough? The best man cannot
help him out -- he's given to his own
uncomfortable cummerbund. Inside the mirror,
several bridesmaids look
and look, in the worst
half-light,

too long, too little, not enough alike.
And who can stand to be
made up for good? And who can face
being adored? I swear

there is no frame
that I would keep you in.
I didn't love a shape
and later find you to fit it--
every day your sight was a surprise.
You made my taste, made sense,
made eyes. But when you set me up
in high esteem, I was a star
that's bound, in time,
to fall. The bound's
the sorrow of the song.
I loved you to no end,
and when you said "So far,"
I knew the idiom: it meant So long.


In this poem, I think that McHugh is really playing off of the ways language comes to create its own identity, and in many ways, it is the language that overpowers the woman. In Rich's poem, Rich examines the way in which language is used to create an alternate reality. The first section, with its beautified wording, explores the narrator's ideal and the way he (I'm going with the assumption this first narrator is a he for the sake of simplicity and my argument) views the female through his own desires of what he wants her to be. His use of language to overpower is reflected in the second half of the poem, in which the verb is forcing the noun into submission. In a similar way, McHugh also examines the way in which the words create their own realities, and she intentionally twists the words on themselves to show the complicated way in which we use language. The comforter (both a blanket and a person who offers comfort) inside a box (both a literal blanket box and a box as in limiting the individual, as is referenced again later) and then the more obvious "heart inside a chest" reflect the way in which language is both inadequate to say express what we really want to say and expresses too many different things at once.

In the latter half of the poem, McHugh examines the way in which these language deficiencies trap her. Ensnared within the framework of "star," the object of someone else's ideal, she cannot help but fail. Much like the woman in Rich's poem, the narrator in McHugh's poem feels the pressure of an imposed male ideal. Although she has freed him from conforming to any ideal, he has not granted her the same privilege, and she is still caught within his alternate reality. Her poem is a reaction to this, taking the traditional romantic words that trap her within the ideal and tearing them down, reducing them to a mere play on words, but still in the end, she has not overcome. She is left facing the power and problem of words: the arbitrariness of "I love you" in contrast to "so long," and the capacity for "so far" to become "so long." The relationship offers no constancy, just as words offer no constant meaning as they are shifted from context to context. And in the end, the suitor sizing up, the failing bridesmaids, and the doomed star all add up to the same point: the ways in which we impose our ideas on each other denies them their true identity. But the language breaks down. The relationship cannot endure inevitably. The cummerbund suffocates. And the verb chokes the noun.