This humorous poem is from Rich’s 1955 poetry collection The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. It explores the role of marriage and gender in the rapidly changing culture of the time it was written. It is simply structured, with twenty-six unrhymed lines in one stanza. The long enjambed lines cleverly mirror the thought processes of the speaker.
The expression ‘living in sin’ would have been commonly used in the fifties to describe a couple who were living together without being married. The fifties were a time of enormous social and cultural upheaval in many countries, particularly the United States. People were challenging and rejecting institutions such as marriage. This poem is not really about defying cultural expectations. In fact, it is a brutally honest and wryly humorous exploration of romance. ‘Living in sin’ was supposed to be a condemnatory phrase, but many couples were attracted to the idea of ‘living in sin’, as it made their love forbidden and therefore more exciting. This young couple are trying to defy convention, yet the young woman is bothered by the very things that she feels she should not care about – the dirt of the apartment and being woken by the creaking old staircase.
The poem begins with a witty line: ‘She had thought the studio would keep itself;/ no dust upon the furniture of love’. It never occurred to her that the studio she and her lover are living in would need to be cleaned. She feels disloyal for being irritated by such mundanities as noisy taps and dirty windows: ‘Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,/ the panes relieved of grime.’ She wants to enjoy the paintings one or both of them are working on, but she cannot help being annoyed at the reality of living a bohemian life.
