Martha Rogus
GENGL 602 – Creative Writing
Professor Berwyn Moore
Anthology Analysis 4 – April 8, 2010
“Amends” by Adrienne Rich
The topic of Adrienne Rich’s “Amends” poem (p.337) is about moonlight coming to life
and improving rough areas. She begins with imagery of stars exploding from the bough of an
apple tree and describes the action of the encroaching moonlight in areas that have either rough
texture or rough characteristics. Rich’s point-of-view is omniscient to describe the movement of
this moonlight reminiscent of Carl Sandburg’s poem, Fog. Rich personifies moonlight similar to
the way Sandburg personifies fog.
Rich’s choice of verbs to personify moonlight is one of the most effective elements in
this poem. The moonlight picks, rises, lays, licks, flicks, pours, leans, soaks, and dwells. Her
choice of nouns cover a large, visual area and include small stones, greater stones, the surf, the
sand, a broken ledge, cliffs, tracks, the gash of a sand-and-gravel quarry, the fuselage of a cropdusting plane, trailers, and eyelids, but the focus remains on the actions of the moonlight
touching all of these places to make amends as suggested by the title and ending line. The word
choices for personification convey the notion life is rough as the moonlight soothes and
comforts. It could be argued a fuselage is not roughly textured, but fossil fuel depletion is rough
on our way of life. The use of the “crop-dusting plane” hints at the rough nature of pesticide use.
Because the nouns selected are things you would find in a landscape, the use of “tracks” is used
in reference to railroad tracks and the rough side of town. Rich’s purpose of the phrase
“tremulous with sleep” is to suggest anxiety, restlessness, or sleeplessness, all rough human
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conditions. The final line, “as if to make amends” sums up the purpose of the moonlight in this
poem as having a healing power to improve this roughness.
Another effective technique Rich uses are the relationships she develops between the
personification and the place. In the following phrases each personification describes a natural
quality of the place the moonlight is interacting with such as “as it rises with the surf / laying its
cheek for moments on the sand” (the water or waves rise and sand lies), “as it licks the broken
ledge” (the words look like “broken leg” a dog would lick), “as it flows up the cliffs” (cliffs are
formed by flowing, blowing winds), “as it leans across the hangared fuselage / of the cropdusting plane” (the way a person leans on a parked airplane). Selection of these two-fold
phrases establishes a natural relationship between the action and place emphasizing the natural
nature of moonlight.
The rhythm of this poem is structured to move the reader’s eyes along smoothly the way
moonlight would move across a landscape. She accomplishes this by using the word “as”
repetitively and in only half of the total sixteen lines to avoid overuse. The repetitive “as” is
used as the onset word in the 1st, 3rd, and 4th lines of the second and last (fourth) stanzas, and
does not appear in the first stanza. The third verse is a variation and repeats “as” as the onset
word in the 1st and 3rd lines.
The only capitalized word is the first word of the poem “Night,” which is significant
since that is the setting. There are no periods. The few commas are used to signal more than one
action and place written within one line, which is done to maintain the four-line stanzas. There
are two colons used to frame the image of stars exploding from within the apple tree bough.
Nights like this: on the cold apple-bough
a white star, then another
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exploding out of the bark:
on the ground, moonlight picking at small stones
The exploding white stars from “out of the bark” suggest power coming from within the tree.
This provides an image of the first stars appearing in the night sky framed by the bough of an
apple tree. It might indeed look like the stars are exploding from the limb of a tree if one were
viewing it from that angle on a crystal-clear night. But, her use of exploding stars from the bark
of an apple tree (with the apple tree representing the fall of man) suggests humanity has the
power within to make amends the way the moonlight makes amends in this poem. The use of
the word “cold” in reference to the “apple-bough” hints that humans struggle to make amends
while the moonlight does it with ease.
The syntax is off for a reason in the first verse. Rich could have said, “the moonlight is
picking at small stones on the ground”, but the flow into the next line, “as it picks at greater
stones” would be interrupted. Instead, the reader gets the next image of the moonlight rising
from the ground, to small stones, then to larger stones, and then to the even bigger surf with “on
the ground, moonlight picking at small stones / as it picks at greater stones, as it rises with the
surf.” The syntax is arranged for meaning, fluency, and flow intentionally.
I like the focus and movement of this poem, and the way she patterned and repeated the
onset word of “as” to create rhythm. I will try writing a poem where the focus is on the
movement of the content and not dictated by form, punctuation, or syntax. Attempting open
form and having it make sense is my biggest challenge. It’s like having the flowers to fill a vase
before you have the vase, or the way a body of water naturally shapes the landscape, where I
tend to want to begin with the vase and then work on finding the flowers after. My next attempt
will be to write an open form poem, and after that, maybe an experiment in personification. I’ve
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shied away from personification for reasons I don’t really understand, but partly because I think
extreme personification can be too cartoon-like. Or, maybe because I like the real, genuine, and
authentic however, now that I see how Rich was able to maintain those qualities in this poem, I
will give it a try.