The Roofwalker

A detailed Summary of The Roofwalker

Adrienne Rich's The Roofwalker is a wonderful piece of literature. The reader can read this poem from an archetypal critical approach or a feminist critical approach. Both these approaches can find evidence to sustain their critique, yet both can be debauched. I will show how to view The Roofwalker from an archetypal approach with slightly more emphasis on how to view the poem from a feminism approach.

As in the beginning, so shall I start with the beginning. Below the title of the poem, there is a dedication: "for Denise Levertov." The beginning is a very important ideal that dates back to the beginning of time. A primordial image was formed in our consciousness that there was nothingness until God created earth. Denise Levertov is a recognized postwar British poet, poetry editor of "The Nation," and later, accepted as an important voice of poetry by using a simple idiomatic style to describe events from everyday life. Levertov's activism and feminism became a prominent part of her poetry in later years. She was also noted for her stylistic relationship of the lines in her poems that caused an almost pulsing rhythmic movement. A student from Capita

Breaching the concept of the beginning, the second stanza transposes the poem to unveil the Self as "...exposed, larger than life." Rich's poems aim of self-definition at establishing boundaries of the self, but they also fight off the notion that insights remain solitary and unshared. A feminist point of view allowing emotion and feeling into the work yet archetypal is recognizing the limitations of the Self. These limitations are also expressed in the middle of stanza three where human experience tells us that mere mortals cannot control the Fates and thus, blame must lay elsewhere as "a life I didn't choose / chose me: even / my tools are the wrong ones / for what I have to do." The myths that have been manufactured by men to image his situations now reflect women's predicament.

In a predicament, the reader stands with the "watcher" and looks above on the rooftop. The roofwalker does his work without head to the sloping sides and the reader wonders if he thinks about the risk, or the reason thereof. Like many poets of her generation Rich's early work was praised of its imitative style. It called to mind W.B. Yeats, and formally and initially it stayed within the confines of 1950's academic verse. It also reflected t

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Approximate Word count = 833
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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