Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems is not your typical love poem, as the experience of pain, hardship, and loneliness between the two female lovers were mainly shown. Specifically in poem 14, Rich reveals the inability of the lesbian couple to show more of an intimate affection compared to the honeymoon couples. The honeymoon couples were “huddled in each other’s laps and arms”, while the speaker of the lesbian couple had “I put my hand on your thigh / to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine, / we stayed that way”. I believe the difference between the two different display of actions, and level of affection, shows the hardship of the lesbian couple; as their description of vomiting was not “as if all suffering were physical” but points to the emotional pain from the speaker’s inability to display the same level of intimacy of the honeymoon couple.

Considering the opposition of women in traditional discourse, and especially lesbian women, I believe Adrienne Rich not only wanted to highlight the troubles experienced by lesbian couples, but wanted to bring reform. In Poem 6, Rich shows her thoughts of reform as the speaker begins to describe her lover’s  hands, “Your small hands, precisely equal to my own”. Then afterwards says that, “in these hands / I could trust the world, or in many hands like these”. With these lines, Rich believed in women “handling power-tools or steering wheels”, hinting at the ability that women can hold positions of power, instead of men.

The idea of reform reoccurs in poem 18 and poem 21, when the speaker identified the moon, as “yet more than stone: / a woman”. I came to the conclusion that the “dawn / pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light?”  represented the unequal dominance of man over woman, and the division of light was man’s separation of women (in status and unorthodox love). And when the mood of the “cleft of light” suddenly shifts positively at the end, I believe Rich alluded the separation of women to be able to strengthen the idea of reform by coming together as “a figure of that light”.