Point of View

The poem is written in first person, present tense point of view. This perspective appears from the very first word of the poem, “my” (1). By opening the poem with the first person possessive pronoun, Rich immediately establishes for the reader a space of intimate connection with the speaker and her experiences.

One question in interpreting poetry is the extent to which the speaker’s point of view can be conflated with the author’s. For Rich, a contemporary poet, this issue is additionally complex. She wrote in an era after the theory of the “death of the author,” meaning it was already accepted practice in literary criticism at the time that the poem was composed for critics to treat the speaker and the poet as different figures. However, much of Rich’s personal writing survives, and until her death in 2012 she was still speaking about...