Adrienne Rich's "Living in Sin" is one of the world's best free verse poems.
The poem is one lump chunk on the page but sections itself by lines: 1-7, 8-14, 15-22, and 23-26. The visual (“a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own”), auditory (“each separate star would writhe / under the milkman's tramp”), and olfactory (“last night's cheese”) imagery is superb, precisely supporting the theme of disillusionment.
An omniscient speaker reports the action/details of the narrative. While the reader is admitted into the mind of the young woman in the poem, it is obvious that the woman is not actually telling her own story.
This tactic makes the revelations more objective and believable. If the woman in the poem were reporting the events and the feelings engendered by them, only confusion would ensue, because the woman in the poem is, in fact, confused about her feelings.
The term “living in sin” signifies an unmarried man and woman living together. A more contemporary term is “shacking up.”
Lines 1-17: “She had thought the studio would keep itself”
A young woman putters around a studio apartment discovering the squalor into which she has moved with her boyfriend. The idea of living together had seemed so romantic when he first suggested it: “A plate of pears, / a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat / stalking the picturesque amusing mouse / had risen at his urging.”
But she is discovering that there is dust on the real furniture, even though there had been none on the “furniture of love.” She has to work to keep the place livable. The faucet makes noise; the windowpanes are filthy. This scenario is not what she envisioned when her boyfriend suggested they shake up together.
Lines 8-14: “Not that at five each separate star would writhe”
She also did not imagine that she would be kept awake by the creaking stair-steps and be awakened at 5 a.m. by the milkman clomping up those creaking stairs. The “scraps / of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottle” do not look so inviting with the light of morning showing them for what they are—garbage and trash.
She also had not bargained for a stare-down with a cockroach that has positioned himself “on the kitchen shelf among the saucers” making her apprehend that he must be from “some village in the moldings” where myriad others of his ilk dwell.
Lines 15-22: “Meanwhile, he, with a yawn”
The studio proves to be a sty, unlike any love-haven she could picture prior to moving in. Even her man disappoints her: with a bored demeanor, he plunks out of few notes on the piano but complains that it is “out of tune.” Might this suggest that he does not even know how to play the piano? So he gives himself a quick look in the mirror, “rub[s] at his beard,” and leaves the apartment to buy cigarettes. What, no kiss good-bye?
While alone, she is “jeered by the minor demons”— annoyed by petty thoughts that irk her more than anger her. So she gets busy, making the bed and dusting, but “let[s] the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.” Oops, another irksome detail of “living in sin.”
Lines 23-26: “By evening she was back in love again”
Nevertheless, once her man is back, and they snuggle up together with wine and cheese again, she finds herself “back in love again.”
But later as she tries to sleep again, she remembers the irritating details of the grubby little place she is sharing with this yawning man as the creaking stair-steps remind her of what “living in sin” looks like in the cold light of day.
