The Building of Power

In “Power” by Adrienne Rich, the fact that the present is made up of the past is described. How our “now” is built by the events in the past. For an example, Marie Curie died from getting exposed to radiation. I thought it was also interesting how the poem expressed, “she suffered from radiation sickness / her body bombarded for years by the element / she had purified” (Rich 7-9). Curie cleansed the element by becoming the container of the plague. She was the scapegoat of the terrible affects of radiation. At the end of the poem, it is written, “her wounds came from the same source as her power” (Rich 17). Power is something obtained by building confidence, the building of past events, which also creates wounds.

The title of the poem is “Power.” The lines in this poem sometimes have unusual breaks, with more than one space between words. In her first stanza, the first word broke off unusually, is the word “in.” In the second stanza, it’s “out”; in the third stanza, it’s “from”; in the last stanza, it’s “a.” I interpreted this as a transition of the speaker consisting of power: one goes in and out of the state containing power, one obtains something from power, and one becomes a power. Therefore, one becomes power after playing with it and practicing it through time.