For the Record - A poem by Adrienne Rich

Comment 2 of 2, added on April 9th, 2009 at 1:08 PM.

i just think that these people need to get real. Living life is not simply writing about it. Do you guys just want to be the writers or the ones someday written about. Live life...do not just evaluate it. It is too short..Believe me the final analysis many of us will not like. I've come to my senses.

Lina from United States

Comment 1 of 2, added on November 23rd, 2005 at 8:26 PM.

Its not done but this is it so far...
For the Record by Adrienne Rich was a moving poem about World War One. She was the speaker in this poem. She spoke to the people back home not fighting in the war. Adrienne Rich tells us that this war did not start from the environment, but from the people.

The tone of this poem is both insensitive and horrifying. You can tell the insensitivity of this poem from the quote “Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied women were, the drunk and crazies, the ones you fear most of all: as where you were”. The significance of this quote is that this makes it sound very insensitive because it is the last stanza which stands out the most of all of them. The anger that the people back home is as much as the men fighting in the war. It is not because they want more land that they are angry they are angry because they are not fighting and they feel like cowards. Saying something like that would just make it worse.

The tone of the poem is also very horrifying as all of the terrible things that happen in the trenches during the war. “So many depths of vomit, tear slow-soaking blood.” The significance of this quote is very horrifying as you read it, how the soaking of blood and vomit is happening all the time at war. The conditions must have been distressing. The men at war are the ones that are killing each other. It is not the environment; it is the other men’s choice to pull the trigger.

The speaker of this poem is a women involved in the war. Adrienne Rich is the name of the speaker. “By: Adrienne Rich”. The significance that she wrote it is enormous. It is now primary information. She was there and it is of the war through her eyes. She knew that it was the people who started the war because she new that it was more for the leaders of the country to acquire revenge.

olivia merrithew

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