Living in Sin

“Living in Sin” is one stanza long and uses past-tense verbs and third-person pronouns with an unnamed female and male character as well as a detailed setting to make the poem feel like a short story.

Rich starts with the female who, at the beginning of the poem, looks at the mess of her studio apartment, wondering why she has to clean now that she’s in love; she thought there’d be “no dust upon the furniture of love” (Line 2). Surveying the scene, she seems to feel guilty about desiring that the things around her be cleaner and quieter, as the speaker interjects the powerful words “half heresy” in this moment (Line 3).

As if using a camera, the speaker spans the apartment, describing it for readers and allowing the subjects to embody its full array of contents: “a plate of pears” (Line 4), a piano with a shawl, and a cat chasing a mouse. These items suggest a contrast between the wealth and the poverty, the passion and the disinterest of the woman’s situation.

The speaker announces that it is early morning, 5am, and personifies the stairs using the word “writhe” (Line 8) to describe them under the milkman’s steps. With this aural imagery, the reader gets a sense of a particular time period when milkmen constituted a profession and perhaps a feeling of oldness, a building in need of repairs. This morning light now allows the female to tune in to even more visual detail of her surroundings: “scraps / of last night’s cheese” (Lines 10-11), bottles, and another item, like in the list of three in the paragraph above, that causes surprise: “ a pair of beetle-eyes” (Line 14). These eyes are a form of synecdoche, meaning the eyes represent the whole of the beetle. The poet calls this beetle an “envoy” (Line 14), a messenger sent from a neighboring town, except that its message is only in the form of direct eye contact with the female character.

The result of the beetle’s mission is unknown, whether it is judgment or comradery, as the speaker moves on and introduces the male character in the next line. He performs a series of morning actions that seem routine and precise. Waking up, he plays the keyboard, yawns, says it is not in tune, goes to the mirror, rubs his beard, and leaves to buy cigarettes. The speaker does not stay on him long, implying that the focus of the poem and the primary responsibility remains with the woman.

With his short appearance and disappearance, the speaker returns to the woman, who seems rattled by the disturbances she saw and heard earlier this morning. Despite these feelings, she continues about her chores: making the bed, dusting the tables, and making coffee that “boil[s] over on the stove” (Line 22). This is the third time Rich creates a series of three and provides an anomaly, or a surprise, with the third item. This woman clearly has a routine with her chores, but even in that routine, she has imperfections that show her uncertainty about her situation.

Time jumps abruptly to the evening, and “she [is] back in love again” (Line 23), another element of contrast in the poem. Yet, this is not a peaceful love because “throughout the night / she [wakes] sometimes to feel the daylight coming” (Lines 24-25). Daylight represents reality, a dread about love that the woman experiences earlier in the poem. Rich ends the poem with a simile, or a comparison between the woman’s discomfort and the milkman constantly walking up and down the steps. The sound of the rattling steps suggests the rattling in the woman’s mind about her hopes amidst her reality.