From a Survivor - Adrienne Rich

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men and women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everyone else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing moments

each one making possible the next


From a Survivor is a poem written by Adrienne Rich in response to the death of her husband, Alfred H. Conrad. After Adrienne Rich left her husband in 1970 he committed suicide. It is understood that he was suffering from problems in his career during this time also. The title of the poem, From a Survivor, clearly tells us that there has been a death of some description.

Rich describes at the start of the poem that their marriage was the 'done thing' in the past:
"The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men and women in those days"
Rich is actually starting the poem with a hint that there was nothing special about them at all, that their marriage was just part of the ordinary course of events involved in having a relationship.

The poet then goes on to say that she didn't know why they ever thought they were so special, why they ever thought that they "could resist the failures of the race." We all have failures and Rich and her husband were no exception. However, she does mention that "Lucky or unlucky", they didn't know this. Unlucky that they didn't know because they could have saved themselves so much time and heartache, but lucky that they didn't know because they got three sons and good memories from the relationship.

The reader knows that there were good memories because Rich is sorry that he is dead. She says that he is "wastefully dead".

Rich does mention, however, that her husband's body is "no longer / the body of a god". He no longer has any control over her and cannot tell her what to do. She has made the leap to a new life, a life with her new partner, Michelle Cliff, which is full of "brief, amazing moments". Rich is sad that Conrad never made this leap himself.

At the end of this poem, we can see that Rich feels her husband's suicide was a shame, but we can also see that she is moving on. The final line, "each one making possible the next" makes reference to the future. This tells us that the poet has moved on, but the fact that she wrote this poem in the first place, 20 years after her husband's death, means that she has not forgotten him.