Relationship Between Nature and Culture
Nature and culture, or wilderness and human civilization, are often thought about in binary terms. In “Amends,” Rich subtly challenges this viewpoint by depicting humans and the rest of the world as part of a continuum. By repeating the phrase “as it,” Rich emphasizes that the moon touches the whole world, from the natural beauty of the apple tree to the industrial function of the crop-dusting plane. Injustice and environmental destruction thus exist in the same world as, and in connection with, beautiful natural places. In the final stanza, Rich describes the people asleep in the trailers in the same tender tone she uses to describe the seashore. This stresses that people are also part of the beauty of the natural world.
Violence of Industrial Society
Although “Amends” describes a series of beautiful scenes, those scenes are touched with violence. Even in the opening stanza, Rich refers to the stars “exploding” out of the apple-bough. The beach also seems wounded, with its “broken ledge” and sand which must be comforted by the moon laying its cheek on the sand. This imagery becomes more intense in the third stanza, in which Rich describes the “gash/of the sand-and-gravel quarry,” metaphorically comparing the quarry to a wound. The phrase “hangared fuselage” to describe the crop-dusting plane also suggests violence by echoing the highly technical language used by the military.
“Amends” thus describes a landscape marked and suffused by the threat of violence. However, the perpetrators of this violence are absent. Rich describes the people in the trailers tenderly, language which ties them to the rest of the landscape, rather than the corporations who dug the quarry. As the final line stresses, there is no one available to really make amends—the corporations that perpetrate violence are faceless, off-stage.
What Makes a Difference
Throughout “Amends,” the moon attempts to offer comfort to the wounded landscape. It “lays its cheek” upon the sand, “licks the broken ledge,” and “dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers.” These images personify the moon as an empathetic being, reaching out with affection to a world that is hurting. However, Rich also emphasizes that the moon is largely ineffectual. Its light fills the gash of the quarry, but it cannot heal the wound in the land. It touches the eyelids of the sleeping workers, but it cannot really make amends for the unjust world they live in. By stressing that the beauty of the moon cannot tangibly make the world a more just or less violent place, Rich suggests that the beauty of nature cannot make up for the injustice of our society. Only material political action can do that.
