Adrienne Rich - First Things
I can't name love now without naming its object— this is the final measure of those flintspark years when one believed one's flash innate. Today I swear only in the sun's eye do I take fire.
This poem by Adrienne Rich highlights the hidden power of poetry. Poetry has the ability to change in meaning as we, the readers, change over time. When I first came across this piece in Rich’s Snapshots of a daughter-in-law, I was in my early 20s and still writing Neruda-inspired poems of passion. I wrote a small note in the margin of the page - “Rich hates her life and her marriage” - and seemingly moved on to the next piece. Had I been a critic alive when it was published, I might have echoed the public opinion that the collection was bitter and unhappy. But I think that interpretation is myopic and doesn’t hold up against an objective breakdown of the piece, and is just pretty shitty.
The poem starts seemingly defeated with “I can’t name love now / without naming its object.” She can’t separate the concept of love from the objects in her life that have become the vehicle for the emotion.
When we are young, so many words are more ideas than practice. All of the big emotions, certainly, carry far more potential energy than kinetic. Our lists are short, compared to what they will be later in life. Loves, tragedies, betrayals and perhaps even dissatisfactions and regrets in their nascent years are largely amorphous.
Time eventually gives us concrete objects to anchor these ideas firmly into our minds and histories. For some things, this can be terrible. And it is true, from some angles the anchoring of love to a real person/place/thing can remove some of its magic. But if you shift perspective a bit, that concrete love becomes more meaningful than the idea of love ever was. It is flawed, sure, but it is also tangible and dynamic. Rich’s naming of the object of love is an acceptance of this evolution.
An important (though sometimes missed) part of maturation is the Jungian psychic death. A transformation from one iteration of self, often immature and self-centered, to another that has a renewed perspective. Rich reflects on the end of “those flintspark years when one believed one’s flash innate” as a way of marking the end of that immature view of ourselves as an island.
Notice that the “flintspark” of the forth line gives way to the “flash” of the sixth and finally to a “fire” in the eighth line of the poem. This is the evolution of a fire. Fire is needed for heat and as a result, for life. The flash might be beautiful for a moment, but it has no practical use. There might be a sadness to the external dependence on the sun to find fire, but there is also something beautiful about the power and intensity of that fire in comparison to the earlier sparks.
Finally, the structure of the piece itself matures from its beginning to its end. The first four lines are long and of unsteady meter. But as the narrator begins to acknowledge and accept the maturation of her love, she shifts to a consistent iambic foot. The flow becomes balanced. Even the longer line about the sun feels as if it belongs within the 5 dimetric lines surrounding it.