Living in Sin

Rich uses third-person pronouns for “Living in Sin,” a poem that has some of the intimacy of first-person poetry. Some of Rich’s work is associated with Confessional poetry, a personal style of writing that emerged in the 1950s. With this type of intimate poetry, the line between poet and speaker often merges, so that a poem by Sylvia Plath can be said to be dictated from “a speaker,” as should be the case with poetry, or from the poet herself, given the autobiographical details on display. When analyzing poetry, it’s best to never assume that the poet is the speaker, but Confessional poetry gave rise to this so-called breaking of the fourth wall.

In “Living in Sin,” Rich appears to adopt some of the intimacy of Confessional poetry voice and tone. Rich covers both the activities of the male and female characters with what seems like an omniscient, or all-knowing, speaker, but, at the same time, provides the internal thoughts of the female character, making it seem like third-person limited, meaning limited to the thoughts of one character. Given Rich’s own experiences as a woman married to a man and a life of domesticity, it makes sense that Rich would speak for the female character more intimately than the male. All that Rich provides about the man is that he leaves with a yawn and a shrug after discovering that he is playing an out-of-tune piano, suggesting his possible tiredness or disengagement. The woman does not respond to this situation or even interact with the piano, intimating that she is used to his behavior or that she is too focused on her own.

Right away, the poem states that the woman is surprised that she has to clean at all: “She had thought the studio would keep itself” (Line 1). The woman is able to hold together her feelings about her situation in order to perform her daily tasks, but something uncertain rests beneath the surface. For example, while she makes the bed and finds a towel with which to dust the tabletops, she makes another mess: “the coffee-pot boil[s] over on the stove” (Line 22). This example is not a direct statement of her feelings, but the actions suggest her trouble or disinterest in mastering the details of domesticity. The most direct statement comes at the end when the speaker mentions that the woman is “back in love again” in the evening (Line 23) when her work is complete, giving even more credibility to the interpretation of her not enjoying morning domesticity. It appears that the woman intertwines her romantic feelings with her feelings as the housekeeper, which can lead to uncertainty in her relationship.