A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Rich’s speaker frequently references open “wounds” (Line 5) and “bleeding” (Line 10). These two symbols, taken together, represent a prescriptive, patriarchal image of injured femininity through their association with menstruation. “[W]ounds” (Line 5) is an early modern slang term for female genitalia. The slang plays on the sex organ’s appearance and the idea that females lack something that males have—that they are castrated males. The word also resonates with Christian ideas of Christ’s sacrifice. The archaic exclamatory “zounds” is a conjunction of “God’s wounds.”

Rich’s use of the word “wounds” (Line 5) is informed by its history, and this history is, in part, what causes her speaker’s “pain” (Line 8). The patriarchal conception of womanhood and female bodies extends to medical control and the “drug that slowed the healing of wounds” (Line 5). This medical misogyny threatens to keep the speaker’s wounds open and maintain the speaker’s position as a lesser human (See: Themes).

Time and space have a unique relationship in “Valediction.” In lines like “when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time” (Line 14), Rich’s speaker states a preference for the temporal over the spatial. This preference suggests that the speaker has a historical