Necessities of Life

“Necessities of Life” traces the speaker’s evolution from a constrained woman and artist to a freer, more self-defined person. The poem opens with a description of the speaker at the moment of rebirth: We know that this is not the first birth because she is here to “re-enter the world” (Line 2). Reborn, she must reconstruct herself “Piece by piece” (Line 1). The choice of words has two meanings: the speaker’s fractured state is akin to a jigsaw puzzle, and she reconstitutes herself by creating a collection of art pieces. The stanza break structurally reflects Rich’s claim that she is made up of pieces, as each thought and sentence is broken by stanza breaks. The line breaks reinforce this idea: As readers put the poem's phrases together, they are giving her work existence and meaning.

Rich now moves from the present to the past. Her retrospection begins with a simple, yet bold claim: “I first began” (Line 2). This declaration alludes to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible, which starts, "In the beginning." Rich is comparing the development of herself to the mythical process of world creation Genesis portrays. In the next stanza, however, the universe-encompassing possibilities of this comparison are immediately limited and constrained. Her “old myself” is “small” and “fixed” (Lines 4, 3).

Rich compares this tiny existence to that of a thumbtack “pushed into the scene” (Line 5)—an image that highlights her lack of agency. Trying to understand her surroundings, the speaker's “hard little head [is] protruding” (Line 6) from the art world and the expectations ascribed by art history. The speaker first exists as just a dot that finds it dizzying to be just one of many dots within the roiling mass of artists: “the pointillist’s buzz and bloom” (Line 7). But soon the dot “begins to ooze” (Line 9), allowing itself to expand as the energy of what is around it affects it: “[c]ertain heats / melt” the dot (Lines 9-10). Still, this transformation is a negative one. Words like “melt” (Line 10), “blurring” (Line 12), and “swallowed” (Line 15) all suggest that the speaker feels overwhelmed and consumed by these changes.

The next four stanzas explore what it means for the speaker to be an artist and woman. She changes so rapidly that she is “blurring into ranges” (Line 12), suggesting that she begins to lose her identity. She goes from one extreme to almost its opposite—red to green, which are colors almost across from each other on the spectrum—but both positions are “burnt” and “burning” (Line 13). The wildly fluctuating change is in danger of destroying her personal and artistic identity.

Now an artist without her own identity, she completely loses herself, immersed in the work of important predecessors: Different “biographies swam up and / swallowed [her]” (Line 15) so fully that she reminds herself of Jonah, the biblical figure who was swallowed whole by a whale. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a 20th-century Austro-British philosopher whose work examined how reality is shaped by words and how the limits of the language echo the limits of our world. 18th century English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest feminist works in English. In trying to come to terms with the outsize influence of predecessors, the speaker experiences something American literary critic Harold Bloom would term "the anxiety of influence"—the fear of not living up to the giants in one's field. The speaker’s anxiety of influence is revealed in her last allusion: She describes herself as Louis Jouvet, a prolific 20th-century French actor and director, here “dead / in a blown-up photograph” (Lines 18-19). Taking on the roles laid out for her by those who came before, by expectations, or by her own ambition has made the speaker feel like a simulacrum of death.

But after this suffocating period comes a shift. Although she has been “wolfed almost to shreds” (Line 20), an image of prey being torn apart by a predator that echoes the earlier description of a fractured self, Rich hints at a coming freedom from repression. Melding the artistic process with identity formation, she “learned to make [her]self / unappetizing” (Lines 21-22). This proclamation is surprising: Rather than present herself as a beautiful piece of art to be consumed by others, Rich revels in becoming as “[s]caly as a dry bulb” (Line 22). In contrast to her previous self, this self is not useful to those around her. Instead, she exists only for herself: She “used [her]self, let nothing use” her (line 24). While she has been discarded and “thrown into a cellar” (Line 23), this is more freeing than upsetting.

On one hand, “being on a private dole” (Line 25) suggests that the speaker now lives a subsistence living supported by funds given by a private source. Yet the word dole also has an archaic literary meaning—destiny. This destiny is quite domestic and unambitious. No longer drowning under the influence of hard to live up to stars like Wittgenstein and Wollstonecraft, she instead digs into her Jewish roots for models. Unlike Jonah, whose fate inside the whale was solitary and extreme, the speaker now identifies with the Hebrews in the Old Testament story of Exodus: the slaves “kneading bricks in Egypt” (Line 26). Though this labor is arduous, her life “was mine” (Line 27) once more. She is one of many, liberated through anonymity, and free to enjoy “the bare necessities” (Line 33)—something important enough to give the poem its title. Like the oppressed Jews in the story, she might yearn for a messiah to deliver her to the promised land, but she also can savor small moments: “to lay / one hand on a warm brick” (Lines 28-29) and to “touch the sun’s ghost / with economical joy” (Lines 30-31). The positive word choice highlights warmth and productive, repetitive toil. Rather than aspire to socially-defined greatness, she now aims for “middling-perfect” (Line 35). Her life is as “solid / as a cabbage-head” (Line 38), which allows her to relish retrospection.

Rich's feminist emerge in the next section of the poem. The chimney smoke from the houses she sees becomes a “curl of mist” that is “visible as my breath” (Lines 39, 40). During the winter, the chimneys seem to exhale the same way people do. The houses are like “old women, knitting, breathless / to tell their tales” (Lines 42-43). Viewing this row of houses, the speaker emerges from her physical isolation and emotional alienation to connect with her community. The speaker has “invitations” to join (Line 38) a community of older women who no longer face the same social pressure to present themselves as desirable and can instead focus on their craft, and also share stories and experiences. By showing the importance of community, Rich expresses the feminist concern that women should support each other to express themselves as an act of consciousness-raising.