Necessities of Life

“Necessities of Life” traces the speaker’s evolution from a constrained woman and artist to a freer, more self-defined person. The poem opens with a description of the speaker at the moment of rebirth: We know that this is not the first birth because she is here to “re-enter the world” (Line 2). Reborn, she must reconstruct herself “Piece by piece” (Line 1). The choice of words has two meanings: the speaker’s fractured state is akin to a jigsaw puzzle, and she reconstitutes herself by creating a collection of art pieces. The stanza break structurally reflects Rich’s claim that she is made up of pieces, as each thought and sentence is broken by stanza breaks. The line breaks reinforce this idea: As readers put the poem's phrases together, they are giving her work existence and meaning.

Rich now moves from the present to the past. Her retrospection begins with a simple, yet bold claim: “I first began” (Line 2). This declaration alludes to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible, which starts, "In the beginning." Rich is comparing the development of herself to the mythical process of world creation Genesis portrays. In the next stanza, however, the universe-encompassing possibilities of this comparison are immediately limited and constrained. Her “old myself” is “small” and “fixed” (Lines 4, 3).

Rich compares this tiny existence to that of a thumbtack “pushed into the scene” (Line 5)—an image that highlights her lack of agency. Trying to understand her surroundings, the speaker's “hard little head [is] protruding” (Line 6) from the art world and the expectations ascribed by art history.