Adrienne Rich's "The Roofwalker" Adrienne

Adrienne Rich's "The Roofwalker" Adrienne Rich's poem "The Roofwalker," like most great modern poems, takes a very common object and the feelings associated with it and looks at them in a new and somewhat alarming light. The central image for this poem is a house, and more specifically the roof of a house.

In the poem, rather than providing the comfort and security that a house -- and especially a roof -- is supposed to provide, the houses are repeatedly compared to ships and possibly rocks in the ocean, exposed to danger and providing more insecurity and uncertainty than anything else. This, however, is only the most basic reading of the poem, and there are many other images apparent in the plain language of the poem and in the subtext.

Rich's use of diction and imagery reflects at once both the starkness and bleakness of the speaker's hopes and the richness and depth of her feeling. Even the purely physical elements of the poem -- line length, meter, and the use of space on the page, are in ways reflective of the meaning of this poem.

Rich uses all of the tools in her poetic tool-belt to draw the reader into the experience of the speaker, who is at once certain of doom and completely confused on several levels, creating a far deeper meaning for the poem than prose could ever hop to parse. The breakdown of the house as a symbol of security begins in the very first line of the poem: "Over the half-finished houses" (1). The first thing that the reader might notice is that the houses are only half-finished.

They are not being presented in the act of being finished; there is no action for the houses in the first line, merely the comment that they are half-finished, which really means that they are un-finished. These houses do not have the physical capabilities of offering protection, and there is something about them that is only half formed, like a warping of their nature. Action is noted in the next few lines by its absence, but here there is none.

This feeling of incompleteness and stagnancy as far as the houses go is somewhat overshadowed -- if you'll excuse the pun -- by the word "over" which starts the line (and the poem). Something is hovering above these unfinished houses, adding an element of threat to the feeling of insecurity. There is something clingy and cloying about the word as it is used in this context, reinforced by the fact that it is "night" which hovers above the half-formed homes (2).

It is also interesting that there is no real introduction to the scene; there is no preliminary description of the houses or the neighborhood, and no indicator of whom the houses belong to. Instead, the reader is dropped into the poem in the middle of the speaker's thoughts, able only to reflect (as the speaker is in that instant) that night has come to hover above a series of unfinished houses, with a group of builders now standing silently on their roves (2-4).

The ocean and ship imagery begins later on in the first stanza, where figures (presumably but not explicitly the builders) are called "Giants, the roofwalkers, / on a listing deck, the wave / of darkness about to break" (6-8). This image increases the sense of turbulence and confusion that occurs when the traditional appearance and feeling of things is cast in a new light (or perhaps more appropriately a new shadow).

Roofers and house builders -- construction workers in general, it can be said -- are traditionally thought of as masculine, burly, and virile figures, and indeed they are called giants by the speaker, which at first seems to perpetuate this image of strength and solidity. In the very next line, however, we see that they are giants "on a listing deck," with a "wave / of darkness about to break / on their heads" (7-9). Like the houses, these "giants" are exposed and unsecured where they should be symbols of security.

This imagery -- both of a ship and of insecurity and simple "wrongness" -- continues when the speaker says in a direct metaphor that "The sky / is a torn sail" (9-10). On a practical level, this is an image of further uselessness and insecurity aboard the "ship" that is this house. A torn sail cannot provide any guidance or momentum; in essence, the ship that belongs to a torn sail is a dead one.

As the houses have already been compared to ships, the "torn sail" of the sky is automatically -- and no doubt intentionally -- associated with the houses that have heretofore been the main subject of the poem. Thus, the night sky fails to provide any further assurance of security or comfort to the dead ships that are the houses. Furthermore, the image of a ship with a torn sail is simply spooky -- it reminds one of ghost ships and dark, supernatural doings.

The feeling of a supernatural quality is intensified by the use of the word "giants" and the speaker's comment that she feels "like them up there: / exposed, larger than life" (13-14). The supernatural aspects of the poem are not really imbued with any sort of power, however, but rather the speaker seems to view herself at odds with nature. This can also be seen in the speaker's identification as a "naked man" (26).

It is difficult to remove all biographical information from the reading of a poem, especially given Rich's pioneering work in feminism and lesbian criticism, and her dedication of the poem to gender critic Denis Levertov.

The speaker's identification as a man -- especially a naked one whose "tools are the wrong ones / for what I have to do" -- can have many meanings, but ignoring the sexual and gender implications in a poem by this author would be as foolish as limiting the reading with such gender and sexuality-based interpretations (24-25). Leaving aside the gender interpretations, the images still back up the view of the speaker as a person confused by and at odds with the world.

The poem's appearance on the page is almost mast-like, which is perhaps an intentional outgrowth of the ship imagery central to the content of the poem. The regularity of the line length gives the.