For an Album

For an Album
by: Adrienne Rich, pg. 358

I love how this poem has line lengths that vary dramatically. The line lengths start from a medium and then end very short. Rich does a good job using line breaks to paint vivid images, as if her poem was the camera capturing the snapshots she describes. I think it is this vivid “storytelling” that captures the reader and pulls him in. Rich also is able to disregard a rule of rhetoric, and create a new adjective, “snowlit.” However, she does well and makes it flow with her poem. Some of the other words in her poem are intentionally strange. There is a “mime of the operating room where gas and knives quote each other.” How is it possible to mime an operating room, and more so with gas and knives quoting each other? A mime is by definition silent, so it is not possible for someone speaking being a mime. Then the juxtaposition of gas and knives is also strange in the context of answering a telephone, because knives cut but gas, and I am assuming this is anaesthestical sleeping gas, will keep a person silent and still. In any case, Rich is able to impart a her meaning of stillness, and use it to create a meaningful social commentary.