Love Is a Figment of the Imagination

Love Is A Figment Of The Imagination

Adrienne Rich's poem “Living In Sin” is poem about a woman's fantasy of a relationship, versus the actual reality of the relationship. The woman in this poem fantasizes about an everlasting love with the man she loves, however reality is the two do not love each other. She envisioned this exciting life which turns out to be lonely and boring. The tone of this free verse poem is depression and despair. Theme is the idea of fantasy versus reality, which are not always what they seem to be. The woman in the sonnet starts off with this hopefulness and joy of a perfect relationship. Then we are presented with the true reality of the relationship. Love is an intangible feeling, can we then conclude that

The poem begins with the past tense, “She had thought the studio would keep itself;

no dust upon the furniture of love.” (1-2). Here the speaker tells of what her idea of love was in the beginning of the relationship. It would keep itself and without any dust, sets the tone of something that is picture-perfect. She thought that love would keep her marriage together, and therefore wouldn’t require much work. In this line, the word “studio”, which means house or apartment, has a clear connotation to an artist, as in a studio artist. We see the reference to music later again in the poem when alluding to the male within this relationship. The lines are short and broken up, which makes the woman in the poem sound despairing. Starting of the poem in the past tense already leads us to believe that things are not what they seem.

At that point, as the poem often does, the speaker leaves fantasy and comes back to reality. In the next line she states “half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,” (3), the alliteration in the use of these two words half and heresy tells us that dreaming of what she wanted is over. The sounds she refers to as taps brings us back to the present. Her wish of the taps being less vocal seems to be in reference to the end of the day. She doesn’t want the day to end because it means the beginning of a next day, where she will have to face her sins once more.

The next few lines continue with the imaginary references of what she had thought her relationship would be, and what it actually is. She envisioned “a piano with a Persian shawl” (5) in her home, but instead reality is she had an apartment that was dirty and filthy. The window panes are covered with dirt and she wishes that they could be “relieved of grime” (4). Scraps of food and empty bottles lie around the home: ‘the scraps / of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles’ (10-11). To make matters worse the apartment seems to be infested with beetles. She says, “on the kitchen shelf among the saucers/a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own---/envoy from some village in the