19 pages • 38 minutes read
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
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Symbols & Motifs
Blood and Wounds
Rich’s speaker frequently references open “wounds” (Line 5) and “bleeding” (Line 10). These two symbols, taken together, represent a prescriptive, patriarchal image of injured femininity through their association with menstruation. “[W]ounds” (Line 5) is an early modern slang term for female genitalia. The slang plays on the sex organ’s appearance and the idea that females lack something that males have—that they are castrated males. The word also resonates with Christian ideas of Christ’s sacrifice. The archaic exclamatory “zounds” is a conjunction of “God’s wounds.”
Rich’s use of the word “wounds” (Line 5) is informed by its history, and this history is, in part, what causes her speaker’s “pain” (Line 8). The patriarchal conception of womanhood and female bodies extends to medical control and the “drug that slowed the healing of wounds” (Line 5). This medical misogyny threatens to keep the speaker’s wounds open and maintain the speaker’s position as a lesser human (See: Themes).
Time and Space
Time and space have a unique relationship in “Valediction.” In lines like “when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time” (Line 14), Rich’s speaker states a preference for the temporal over the spatial. This preference suggests that the speaker has a historical perspective of place rather than a topographical one. The speaker grounds themselves to a place’s past in the same way that Rich’s poem grounds itself in the history of poetic works.
The speaker’s “slowed” (Line 5) healing also suggests a unique attention to the passing of time. Their “experience of repetition as death” (Line 7) connects them to ideas of reincarnation and the repeated birth and death of human generations. In this way, their attention to time highlights the generational distance between Rich and Donne.
Literary Jargon
Rich’s simple language and conversational tone falters when faced with literary terms. The speaker’s attempts to use literary jargon result in difficult statements like “language is a dialect called metaphor” (Line 12). Regardless of the truth or value of such statements if understood, the speaker’s “attempt” (Line 12) to employ literary jargon showcases how it can obscure much more than it reveals.
Literary jargon in Rich’s “Valediction” represents a larger tradition of using specialized language as a mode of exclusion. Particularly in societies that limit certain groups’ access to education, jargon can be a marker of class and cultural prestige. Donne’s speaker uses rhetorical tools and metaphors, for instance, to place himself above the addressee (see: Poem Analysis). By presenting failures of jargon’s ability to communicate effectively, Rich demonstrates that its power often lies in confusion rather than clarification. This is why the speaker can use the language but is unable to articulate more than “those mountains have a meaning” (Line 16).
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By Adrienne Rich
