An Atlas of the Difficult World

“An Atlas of the Difficult World” is a war poem, or more specifically a poem written during a time of war. The perspective comes not from those who fight the war or from those who support and conduct the war. Rather, Rich draws on her own experiences during the 1960s, when the US was engaged in an unpopular war. She interrogates why the country finds itself committed, only a generation later, to another war whose goals seem out of step with the country’s ideals. 

The poem explores complex and philosophical questions: how to define a nation at war; how to come to terms with a government acting out of sync with the beliefs and hopes of its people; how to be a patriot during a war that does not reflect the historical and cultural aspirations of the country; and how to be angry but refuse to abandon faith. Rich loves her country enough to see it honestly and argues that it is time for true patriots to awaken: “A patriot is a citizen trying to wake / from the burnt-out dreams of innocence” (Line XI.30). 

The poem’s perspective is broad. Rich is determined to capture nothing less than the spirit and mood of America itself by moving through different moments in American history, capturing the poet’s urgent, restless investigation. 

The poem is made up of 13 sections. Each section defines its own rhythms and line constructions. Like the human body or some complex ecosystem, the poem’s sections create a whole greater and more dynamic than any of its individual parts. Because Rich’s considerable anger is tempered by compassion and her frustration by hope, the poem insists on a complex interaction with the reader and rejects a simplistic resolution. 

Rich points out that the US is in a dark time: The Gulf War seems like a dangerous and reckless distraction designed to make corporate America wealthier, and there is stark evidence of longer-term problems, like insidious racism, persistent bigotry, economic discontent, environmental destruction, and the aching reality of loneliness in an increasingly dehumanizing technological world. 

Each section catalogues the considerable failings of Rich’s America to create an evidence-based indictment: the difficult circumstances of the working poor (Section I); the relentless accumulation of unrecyclable waste (Section IV); the continuing oppression of Black people, women, Indigenous peoples, and the LGBT community (Section V); mercenary greed (Sections V and VI); the mistreatment of the immigrants who seek America’s promise of hope and tolerance (Section VII); the failures of a racist law and order system (IX); and atomization of communities in a country defined by division and depersonalized by technology (Section X). 

But Rich refuses the surrender to hopelessness: “Blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth / To meet again in mourning” (Line XI.36-37). Instead, speaking directly to the reader, the closing sections offer consolation and exhortation: All we have to make this long-shot experiment in democracy work is each other. 

Key to the poem’s offer of hope is the unexpectedly personal Section III. During summers with her family in New England, her father insisted that despite the coaxing lure of the summer, Rich stay committed to her studies, toiling through a difficult reading list he created for his daughter’s hungry mind. His mantra haunts her still, decades later: “Without labor, no sweetness,” an adage he borrowed from 18th-century French philosopher and moralist Luc de Vauvenargues.

The closing two stanzas show how much Rich has internalized that connection between work and pleasure, both of which Rich partakes in with intensity. It even comes out in the beauty of her companion in New Mexico, which reflects both aesthetic joy and commitment to labor: “Your woman’s hands turning the wheel or working with shears […] your providing sensate hands” (Lines XII.13-14). 

But individual love is not the only solace Rich offers readers. In the poem’s much-anthologized peroration that makes up Section XIII, she extends that consolation beyond the personal and the intimate. Shattering the frame of the poem to address her readers directly, she shows that she sees us and knows that we are a necessary part of her poetry—and the way the country could be transformed. This bond closes the poem with a quiet but urgent affirmation of a transcendent community: “I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope” (Line XIII.35).