Summary
In “Amends,” Adrienne Rich lists everything the moonlight touches as night arrives. The first stanza begins by suggesting that although this poem describes one particular night, there are many nights like this one. The poem’s first image is the flowering branch of an apple tree. Rich describes “white star[s]…exploding out of the bark.” These stars could be either stars themselves, peeking out between the leaves, or the white flowers of the apple tree, appearing suddenly brighter in the light of the moon. At the end of the stanza, Rich references the moonlight for the first time, describing the way it lights up all the small stones on the ground.
The rest of the poem builds on this first description of what the moonlight touches. The beginning of the second stanza builds on the end of the first, with the moonlight also lighting up up larger stones. It then illuminates the edges of the waves, as they rest for a moment on the beach before being reabsorbed by the dark sea. Moving inland from the ocean, the moonlight lights up a single broken ledge, and then the whole cliff where the ledge sits. It also illuminates train tracks, traveling inland from the cliffs and the sea.
In the third stanza, Rich shifts from the largely natural imagery of the first two stanzas to more mechanical and agricultural imagery. The moonlight fills the chasm left by a mine, although it can do nothing to heal the wound. It also lights up an airplane, which has been left in a hanger for the night. The airplane is used for “crop-dusting,” or spraying pesticides and fertilizers onto crops.
In the fourth stanza, the moonlight finally encounters people. It slips through the cracks in trailer homes, lighting up their interiors where people sleep. Then it rests upon the eyelids of the sleeping people, “as if to make amends,” or as if to pay them back for something that has been lost.
Analysis
The structure of “Amends” is simple. From the final line of the first stanza onwards, the poem is a list of everything the moonlight touches. This list structure enables Rich to spend an entire poem describing a single nighttime scene. As the moonlight shifts, the poem illuminates successive parts of the landscape: the surf, the cliffs, the railroad. By the end of the poem, we know that this poem is set by the sea. This sea is surrounded by high cliffs, traversed by railroad tracks which lead into an agricultural community.
This map of the world, told through the movement of the moonlight, tells a kind of spatial story, one which begins with nature and ends in a trailer park. By beginning with the beauty of the “apple-bough” and the surf, Rich makes us think we are reading a nature poem. In this, she implicitly alludes to the tradition of Romantic poetry, in which writers like Wordsworth focused on describing the beauty and wonder of the natural landscape.
However, Rich’s “natural landscape” quickly gives way to the technology-infused world of modern agriculture. As Alan Bewell describes in his book Nature in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History, Wordsworth saw nature as a “spiritual alternative to the pressures of modern industrial, urban, and commercial life” (6). Romantic poems often attempt to recreate this “spiritual alternative” on the page, describing in beautiful language the awe-inspiring vistas of some natural landscape, while allowing their reader to forget for a moment about the evils of human civilization. Rich’s moonlit list refuses to use the natural world as a respite in this way. Instead, in “Amends,” “surf” and “crop-dusting” share the same sentence.
The phrase “as it,” which Rich uses to join together the different parts of her list, furthers this idea. The structure of the poem is linear: it begins with the “apple bough” and the “sand,” then moves to the “crop-dusting plane” and people asleep in trailers. However, “as it” complicates this linearity by subtly emphasizing that all of these things are happening at the same time. The poem may move from one place to another, but the moonlight touches the whole landscape simultaneously. To the moon, there is no difference between “nature” and “modern industrial, urban, and commercial life.”
By destabilizing the boundary between nature and industry, Rich lays the groundwork to make a subtle political point. Often, the idea of nature as a haven, away from the evils of society, has been used to perpetuate injustice. If culture is inherently bad, and nature inherently good, then there isn’t any point in trying to make the world a better place. Instead, we might as well accept the human world as it is, and escape to “nature” when we have the chance.
“Amends,” although it portrays the trees and the sea as beautiful, does not accept the injustice of civilization as inevitable. The last two lines of the poem, “as it dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers/as if to make amends,” establish this idea most explicitly. Rich doesn’t say what the moonlight is making amends for. However, from the agricultural scene, and especially the presence of “trailers” where the people are sleeping, we can infer that at least part of the problem is poverty: the inability of these workers to pay for more permanent or spacious housing. The fact that the moonlight enters the trailers through “cracks” rather than windows further implies that these are cramped places to live. Rich might also have been thinking of the dangers of agricultural work, such the risk of illness associated with industrial agricultural practices like “crop-dusting,” which release large quantities of pesticides and fertilizers into the air and groundwater.
Humans aren’t the only subjects of violence in “Amends.” By the second stanza, Rich’s descriptions of the beautiful natural world suggest that something is wrong. The moonlight seems to be comforting a world that is hurting: it lays its cheek against the sand as though comforting the shoreline, and “licks the broken ledge” as though the ledge has been injured and the moonlight, like a cat, is trying to clean out its wounds. In the third stanza, Rich describes a mine as a “gash,” metaphorically comparing it to a wound in the surface of the earth. The highly technical phrase “hangered fuselage” calls up military associations, even though Rich is describing only a parked agricultural vehicle. This implicit comparison suggests that the “crop-dusting,” like the “gash” of the “sand-and-gravel quarry,” is a form of warfare against the land.
Here again, it’s important to return to the “nature vs. culture” boundary that Rich is so skeptical of. In some ecological writing, especially of Rich’s time, mankind is portrayed as a monolith, at war with the transcendental beauty of “nature.” In “Amends,” this binary doesn’t work. Instead, the poem equates the people in trailers with all the other places and things that the moon comforts. The binary might be between “the world” and “the moon”—a world that is hurting and a celestial body that, beyond that world, gives it comfort.
However, that interpretation is complicated by the fact that the injustices of industrial agriculture, gravel mining, and poverty do not happen on their own. They are perpetrated by the capitalist class: the wealthy who abuse land and workers alike in the pursuit of profit. In “Amends,” the moon is not enough to mend the injustices of the world. When its light pours into the gash of the mine, it is “unavailing,” or ineffectual—it can temporarily fill the hole, but can do nothing to heal it. Similarly, when the light “dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers,” it does so only “as if to make amends.” It is a gesture of comfort and restitution, but it is not enough to truly make amends for the daily injustice of poverty. For a Romantic poet like Wordsworth, the beauty of nature might compensate people for the injustice they experience. However, for Rich, the beauty of the moon is decisively not enough. When night ends and the day arrives, there will still be amends to be made.
Adrienne Rich is best known as a lesbian poet. Her identity, not only as a lesbian woman, but as a lesbian feminist—a woman whose politics stemmed from her experience and social position as a lesbian—might not seem relevant to this poem. However, these politics actually helped inform her perspectives on the “nature vs. culture” boundary. In her essay, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” she wrote “I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create.”
In this statement, Rich refuses to reduce place—and by extension, nature—to a single, ahistorical ideal. Instead, she argues that each place “on the map” has its own history. Through history, places exist in conversation with the people who live in them. There isn’t one “nature” distinct from culture, human history, or individual identity. Instead, there are myriad unique places, which cannot be extricated from how, and by whom, they are experienced.
This idea cannot be totally extricated from lesbian feminism. Homophobia relies on the idea that some behaviors and sexualities are “natural,” while others are not. Political reactionaries often call for a return to “traditional” values, implying that modern civilization is inherently immoral partly because it allows for queer people to exist publicly—people whose practices they deem “immoral.” At its heart, this distinction rests upon the same nature vs culture boundary as the Romantics, once again confining the "evil" to the "unnatural." Theorists who question the existence of a binary between nature and culture often emphasize that what is deemed “natural” is, in fact, also culturally constructed—the idea that heterosexuality is natural, while homosexuality is unnatural, is a product of a specific Western Christian tradition around sexuality. This isn't an explicit idea in "Amends," but it might be part of why Rich is so insistent on the relationship between "nature" and "culture"—the idea that sea and surf cannot be totally distinguished from crop-dusters and trailers.
All this politics is relevant to “Amends,” as it is to much of Rich’s poetry. However, at the end of the day, Rich is writing a poem, not a political essay. There are many ways in which “Amends” is ambiguous, from whether the apple bough gleams with stars or flowers, to what exactly the moon is trying to make amends for. Rather than outline a specific plan of action, the poem is using imagery, syntax, and metaphor to create a sense of one vision of the world.
