An Atlas of the Difficult World

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Sea

In a poem that recreates the abundant land-based beauty of the natural world—the sequoia forests of northern California; the haunted deserts of New Mexico; the vistas of the Grand Canyon; the farms of New England; the “lemon sweep” (Line IX.18) of Nevada’s Yucca Flats—Rich often focuses on the energy and pull of bodies of water: rivers, seas, bays, and supremely, oceans.

In the poem, the sea symbolizes the powerful ebb and flow of change, which Rich sees as a restless and inexorable flux. Bodies of water thus offer a counterpoint to America’s difficult and troubled history—a history repeating similar moral trespasses from generation to generation. Unlike this seeming ongoing decline, the sea symbolizes the promise of renewal and transformation.

The sea, then, offers consolation and hope. Much like Walt Whitman, who also found the ebb and flow of bodies of water consoling and inspiring, Rich describes the oceans as “dialectical waters rearing / their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient” (Lines VIII.15-16). The image is paradoxical: The current is both “wild” and “calm,” and the waves form shapes that are both “momentary” and “ancient.” This element of nature endures no matter what humans do on land, which offers a soothingly distancing perspective of human time scale.

Soledad Prison

At the center of Section X stands the formidable structure of California’s Soledad Prison, now known as the Salinas Valley State Prison. The poem quotes several passages from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970), by a man imprisoned in Soledad for participating in the murder of a guard during a prison riot.

The letters record Jackson’s moral indignation over the lack of humane treatment; he describes prison making Black inmates into desperate men turning on other desperate men. The only solution, Jackson argued, was massive armed resistance to white authority: Nonviolence, Jackson argued, was empty, liberal rhetoric. Although Jackson himself was killed during a 1971 San Quentin Prison revolt protesting the racist treatment, his call to arms energized the Black Power movement.

Jackson’s anger is the result of incarceration that denied Black and white inmates community, compassion, or camaraderie. Soledad Prison then symbolizes the alternative to Rich’s celebration of transcendence and empathy—a dark and dangerous enclosure that breeds violence. Declaiming against becoming a nation of barriers and walls where only the lonely and the desperate exist, Rich quotes Jackson’s fondest hope for America: “[W]here the kindred spirit touches this wall, it crumbles” (Line X.48).

The Implied Reader

A critical motif in Rich’s cycle of poems is the implied reader. Each section of the poem is addressed to the reader who, in the closing section, emerges to take a place within the dynamic of the poem itself. “I know you are reading the poem,” the poet repeats over and over like a chant.

This implied reader is every American—everyone who has borne witness to the traumas of US history, seen the range and dimension of America’s geographical vastness, and felt the considerable impact of hate and greed. The poem seeks to incite the implied reader to act on these experiences, to shoulder a culture-wide effort to evolve America into its best self.

Exposing the injustices, the violence, the brutalities of America’s moment is only worthwhile if readers see the pain and waste and then rise to the challenge of resolving them. It is the implied reader alone who gives Rich’s poem its promise of change.