“Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich was written in 1968 and published in 1971 as part of her collection The Will to Change. It has been reprinted in several other collections of Rich’s work, including The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001, which was published in 2002, and Collected Poems: 1950-2012, which was published in 2016. The Will to Change was published 20 years into Rich’s extensive literary career, which spanned over 60 years.

“Planetarium” is a free-verse feminist poem inspired by the life of Caroline Herschel and other astronomers, including Tycho Brahe. It investigates the experience of being a woman working in science, the gendered myths behind the names for celestial bodies, and explores the role of the poet as a recorder.

Poet Biography

Born in 1929, Adrienne Rich was a pillar of the American poetic world from the time of her first published book of poems in 1950 to her death in 2012. She was raised in Baltimore, along with her sister, torn between Jewish and Episcopalian heritages that her father set against each other. Rich would go on to attend Radcliffe College, and in 1953 married Alfred Conrad, an orthodox Jewish Harvard professor, which her father strongly opposed.

Adrienne Rich would go on to have three sons, acting as homemaker while writing and teaching poetics at Columbia University after the family moved to New York from Massachusetts. Her growing frustration with the societal roles inflicted on women would inform and influence her growing body of work. It was at this time that Rich began to reexamine her sexuality, both personally and poetically, leading to her self-identification as a lesbian. This led her to divorce Alfred Conrad in 1970.

The seventies were the time of greatest activity in Rich’s career, with her organization of feminist groups aligning with her efforts against the War in Vietnam. Her creative output also skewed toward feminist essays and critique during this period, creating a body of work that would remain fundamental to Gender and Women’s Studies to this day. In 1984, Rich moved to Santa Cruz as a result of her growing arthritis. While her poetic output never declined, and she continued to teach at a variety of California institutions of higher education, she was less politically active. She death in 2012.

Poem Text

Rich, Adrienne. “Planetarium.” 1968. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Planetarium” is a free-verse poem with 45 lines. These lines are broken up into 17 stanzas, and some lines are heavily indented. The poem begins with an epigraph, or dedication, to Caroline Herschel, a German astronomer.

In the first stanza, the shapes of women and monsters are compared. These shapes appear in the night sky as constellations.

In the second stanza, the work of a female astronomer (Herschel) is described. She works in the cold with clocks and other instruments. She also takes measurements of the earth’s poles.

The third stanza is about Herschel’s age and discoveries. She lived 98 years and discovered eight comets.

In the fourth stanza, Herschel is compared to other women. She, like other women, is subject to time, described using the moon’s phases. However, unlike many other women, Herschel was able to metaphorically travel through the sky with the lenses of a telescope.

The fifth stanza returns to the idea of women in constellations. The stories behind the shapes in the sky made by stars include women doing penance for being rash and outspoken. These stories are a mental addition to what is able to be seen in the sky.

The sixth stanza is two words offset from the following stanza. An eye is what the speaker is focusing on next in the poem.

This eye is described in the seventh stanza. The adjectives are masculine and mathematical. Also, the eye is located in Uranusborg, the observatory of Tycho Brahe, so it is presumably his eye.

The eighth stanza is one line that describes what the eye is looking at: a nova.

In the ninth stanza, the nova is described as an explosion of light.

The 10th stanza develops and expands the description of the nova. It is exploding outward from the core. This explosion is compared to life flying out of a plural first-person, us, or a community.

In the 11th stanza, Tycho is named. He whispers a famous quote of his that Rich includes in quotation marks. He desires to not have lived in vain.

The 12th stanza returns to the first-person plural. The “we” of the poem observes, and the act of observing is described as an act of change.

The 13th stanza develops the image of the light. The light is more powerful than a mountain but can spare a man.

In the 14th stanza, the idea of the pulsar’s heartbeat is introduced. The heart metaphorically sweats through the singular body of the speaker.

The 15th stanza turns to a radio signal from the sky. The impulse comes from the constellation Taurus.

The 16th stanza is one offset line about the speaker of the poem. She is hit with these radio waves but remains standing.

The final stanza is the longest stanza of the poem. It develops the image of the speaker being hit by these radio impulses for as long as she has lived. The radio signal is described as being transmitted very accurately, but it cannot be translated into our language.

Then, the speaker identifies herself as a galactic cloud. She is so large that it takes light waves to take many years to travel through her. She also identifies herself as a woman-shaped instrument who translates pulsations into images. This act relieves the body and reconstructs the mind.