[In the following essay, Henneberg identifies the feminine and masculine positions in the early poem "Autumn Equinox" in terms of the primary concerns of Rich's later poetry: "the dream and the limitations of a common language."]

Adrienne Rich's semiautobiographical narrative poem "Autumn Equinox" (1955) anticipates two central concerns of her "coming-out" volume of poetry. The Dream of a Common Language (1978), and her subsequent poetry: the dream and the limitations of a common language.

"Autumn Equinox" presents a middle-aged female speaker reflecting on her marriage. In the poem she is portrayed raking autumn leaves in the yard, while her husband, a professor, remains in the house reading Dryden. The atmosphere is one of resignation and silence; and a sense of the speaker's patient anticipation of death, paralleled by autumn's calm move toward winter, pervades the lines. Lyman, the husband, and his wife do not communicate with each other. When the speaker wants to know why he, "that least acidulous of men," reads satires, she does not ask him directly but instead attempts to clarify her perplexity by browsing through his book "[w]hen he [is] gone." She talks more with her neighbor Alice Hume than with Lyman. Though she calls these chats the "dry philosophy of neighborhood," they surpass her exchanges with her husband, for it is in connection with Alice and never with Lyman that the verbs "to say" and "to talk" appear.

A long flashback follows, in which the speaker admits that Lyman has never been the man of her dreams, that she joined him out of "[a] woman's need for love of any kind." She thinks back to her wedding day, which was perfectly acceptable in the eyes of all the other participants but terrifying to her. Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath's "The Disquieting Muses," the passage describes how the speaker's "aunts … nodded like the Fates," signaling that "nemesis was accomplished." The speaker and Lyman are only the "semblance of a bride and groom," and the wedding, to her, is not the blissful climax of her life but a "dry immutability." She never clearly states that babies were born, but if we assume that her children are the "angular young [who] took up their bats and shouted / Throughout the afternoon," then that is all they have been to her: angular youths playing and shouting all afternoon. She makes no endearing mention of them.

The speaker becomes aware of her dissatisfaction with her married life and decides to attempt her first act of resistance: She "change[s] the parlor curtains / To ones the like of which were never seen / Along our grave and academic street." These she hangs up "in defiance." Next, she admits to herself that she despises the way her bond to her husband has kept her distant from experience and from all the "marvels of the world." Marriage has made impossible the access to such treasures as "The Pyramids" and "Cologne Cathedral"; they have been reduced to pictures, literally locked away in frames of black oak. The speaker soon gives signs of her unhappiness, weeping at night and voicing that she "thought life was different than it is." But she cannot explain what she means and thus lets her feelings drift into silence.

Because the poem's speaker is unable to communicate with her husband. Alicia Ostriker has concluded that hers is "'the unsaid word' of a wife in loyal stasis while her husband ranges" and that she "goes down to old age mildly, unprotesting." Silence, unsaid words, unprotesting attitudes, however, are not necessarily an absolute nothing, and they certainly do not have to indicate loyalty. As Michel Foucault states,

Silence itself—the thing one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say…. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Foucault argues that there exist different ways of "not saying things," and I would suggest that for the poem's speaker, such acts as hanging up loud curtains and admitting to herself that she is utterly unhappy are ways of "not saying things." Above all, however, the poem itself, five pages worth of reflections, represents an important discourse that runs parallel to her silence.

Returning to the present, to the autumn of the year and of her life, the speaker tries to convince us and herself that at some indeterminate point in life she ceased to be dissatisfied and began to live out her marriage—society's dream of the common language—contentedly. The final image of the poem seems to support such assurances of contentment: She has "raked three bushel baskets full of leaves— / Enough for one September afternoon." However, her apparent satisfaction, like her silence, is undermined by an eloquent narrative that does nothing but question, doubt, and criticize the past and the present. Moreover, the activity of working outdoors until three baskets are filled with leaves suggests her need to let out frustration, to counteract Lyman's stasis in the house, to express herself.

Her seeming resignation and passivity are, in other words, not real. Though she gives the appearance of patiently acquiescing to a doomed life of matrimony with nothing left to hope for but death, a very real resistance to that fate pervades the whole text. The poem is appropriately set during the autumn equinox, the time of year when night, which might be associated with the female speaker, and day, representing her husband Lyman, are of equal length and strength. From this point on, night will be longer, thus represented more strongly. As surely as autumn equinox will give way to longer nights, the wife will succeed in changing the terms of her marriage: the dominance, privileges, and priorities that have hitherto always worked to her disadvantage will be altered. When she claims, "We finish off / Not quite as we began," she is expressing confidence in this change, rather than what at first sight may be taken to be pessimism and resignation.

The poem's attack is not primarily directed against man/Lyman but against marriage, the institution that, according to Rich, brings unhappiness to both individuals involved. "Young lovers," both male and female, who "talk of giving all the heart / Into each other's trust" use a "rhetoric" that "Won't stand for analyzing." Rich recognizes that there are necessarily and always differences between individuals and sees the danger of attempting to ignore those differences through the union of marriage. If marriage is the common language, then the common language is too limited; a language of difference that acknowledges the individuality of identities is preferable by far.

Although Rich focuses on connection and distance between women in The Dream of a Common Language and her subsequent book of poetry, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), the recognition that differences between individuals, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual, cannot always or entirely be effaced by a common language is as central to her later poetry as it is to "Autumn Equinox."