Summary
The first one-line stanza indicates the context of the poem: “the earth deposits of our history.” In the second, four-line stanza, which begins with the word “Today,” the speaker delves further into the way history is embedded in the earth. She describes a backhoe digging up a field to reveal an amber bottle, which leads her to speculate on its contents: “a cure for fever or melancholy” or “a tonic for living on this earth.” Although she does not know its true contents, she recognizes it immediately as a kind of medicine for real ailments, or for the simple task of living.
In the third, eight-line stanza, this line of thinking leads the speaker to a figure who was one of the inventors of medicine: Marie Curie. Rich describes in details Curie’s radiation sickness, and the ways in which Curie’s body was physically destroyed by her work with radioactive elements. Despite her cataracts, cracked limbs, and loss of mobility, Curie always denied that her physical illness was the result of her work with radioactive isotopes.
In the final, four-line stanza, Rich suggests twice that Curie denied her wounds. In particular, she denied that they “came from the same source as her power.”
Analysis
In introducing the idea of the “earth-deposits of our history,” the first line serves two functions. First, it suggests that human history is forever tied to and embedded in the earth itself. Second, in introducing the idea of a “we” who possess this history, Rich seems to specify a female audience to whom the poem is addressed.
The second stanza builds on the idea of a history enclosed within the earth, and imagines digging up that history. Beginning with “Today,” the stanza emphasizes the importance of this history for the present moment. In the present-tense of the poem, she observes a large machine digging into a “crumbling flank” of earth. This description makes the earth at once fragile and animal: like a body, it has a flank, and like a body, it can be torn apart. When it is, it reveals the relics of the past that it has figuratively digested.
As the second stanza progresses, Rich focuses in particular on a single, unearthed relic: “one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old / cure for fever or melancholy a tonic / for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.” The spacing and enjambment of these lines suggest that the speaker is thinking through the possibilities of the bottle’s contents. It could be a cure for a bodily affliction, like “fever,” or for a more abstract psychic state, like “melancholy.” Throughout history, the speaker suggests, medicine has been used not just to treat disease, but to make life more bearable. The task of living on this earth, especially in the “winters of this climate,” requires tools. This is not just because of the literal coldness of winter, but also because of the metaphoric coldness and isolation people (especially women) have experienced throughout history.
Some writers, including Christopher Hamilton, have suggested that the amber bottle actually refers to male doctor's fake treatments for women's diseases like "melancholy," thus contrasting their ineffectual work with the effectual work of Curie as discussed in the next stanza. However, if the "hundred year old" bottle of amber were crafted in 1874, 100 years before the poem's composition, it would be only a bit older than Marie Curie's early-20th-century discoveries.
The third stanza also starts “Today,” thus emphasizing a connection between this mysterious amber bottle and the speaker’s thoughts about Marie Curie. The second line of the stanza uses unique spacing to convey a double meaning: “she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness” suggests first that Curie suffered, as do all people and especially all women, and second that she suffered from radiation sickness in particular.
The speaker explains the irony of the situation: Curie “purified” radium, while her body was in turn contaminated by it. The speaker draws out the effect of this element at length, discussing Curie’s cataracts, which obscured her vision, as well as her cracked “finger-ends,” which made it impossible for her to continue using the tools that enabled her scientific research. The speaker concludes that Curie must have known that she was very ill and dying; she cannot believe that Curie would have been able to ignore the symptoms of her body deteriorating from the inside out. Why, then, the poem implicitly asks, did she deny it?
The fourth stanza interprets Curie’s denial. She used the earth’s power—radioactive elements—to contribute to the scientific community. This power, though it would ultimately prove deadly, allowed Curie to maintain her efforts and work throughout her life, and to gain recognition as a woman in a male-dominated community. Rather than admit that her power and her wounds came from the same place, she denied them entirely.
As the poem begins with a broad overview of history, it asks the reader to interpret the lesson of Curie’s power. Some might interpret the poem to mean that power is fickle: that power inevitably wounds and corrupts. Others might interpret it to speak to women’s power more broadly: true power does not come from absolute strength, but from vulnerability. One cannot have true power without wounds, and in a certain sense, our wounds are always the source of our power. To channel the power that lies in nature, one must be receptive—thus, in the end, vulnerable— to it. When it comes to women’s power, then, this would mean that a history of violence and oppression has both led to women’s historical suffering, and to their potential to embrace their power in the modern era.
