Similarly, Axel Avákar, “fictive poet, counter-muse, brother,” as Rich explains the character to whom she addresses all the poems in the fourth section of the book, is not able to chose who he is or what he does. In “Axel, in thunder,” while everyone else in the scene has taken refuge from the storm, Axel is, by no will of his own, utterly exposed to it:

Axel is only fictional, of course, having been dreamed up by Rich, but he represents, among other things, the untold numbers of real men and women who are not at liberty to shape their own identity. The poem that follows this one, by contrast, offers the hope of choosing who one is and what one does, as this is precisely what the speaker herself does. I will quote “I was there, Axel” in full, to convey its full meaning:

The speaker tells of a woman who endured suffering to claim her own voice, and, having done so, now works to dredge up the lost voices of others. The woman’s journey is a long one, and still not over, as evidenced by one of her arms being bound behind her, and so her suffering continues in her effort to free it. The speaker makes a strong claim of her own action and identity here, which the clipped lines and elliptical syntax promote: “and my decision was” at first reads as if it refers to her decision of “working alongside” the woman in the boat. Continuing on, it reads as if referring to her decision “to be in no other way / a woman.” Grammatically and semantically, the “decision” refers to both what she is doing and who she is: a woman helping another women to lift voices up out of the silence imposed upon them “from far below and long ago.” This is what Adrienne Rich has always done through her writing. This is the woman she has chosen to become, and her latest book of poetry is yet another testament to the unparalleled power she finds in empathy, womanhood, and words.